


Of Butterfly Souls and Stubborn Mules

by sabby1



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Police, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:08:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 38,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21609583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabby1/pseuds/sabby1
Summary: Magnus Bane is a mundane homicide detective in Manhattan, so he's intrigued but not perturbed when he and his partner are handed a new case involving a decapitated body oozing black goop and two unidentified persons of interest waiting in the interrogation rooms, refusing to talk.It's a boy and a girl. Both of them are covered in silver scars and dressed in the kind of tight-and-shiny outfit you would wear to an underground club.Magnus thinks he has a pretty good idea what happened, until the pretty boy opens a shimmering magical portal in the middle of Interrogation Room 2 and pushes him through it.
Relationships: Alec Lightwood & Isabelle Lightwood, Alec Lightwood & Jace Wayland, Magnus Bane & Raphael Santiago, Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 276
Kudos: 486





	1. Chapter 1

Police detective work is ten percent action and ninety percent paperwork. Magnus Bane learned that fact very soon after his promotion. Sometimes it almost makes him miss the beat-cop days, where the ratio was more evenly distributed. Then he remembers the headache of separating drunken domestics and taking useless, contradictory witness statements outside of gas stations and convenience stores.

Magnus could be buried up to his nose in 8.5x11 inch paper with 10-point font, and he’d still prefer it over trying to talk Kimmie out of castrating her husband Bob while she’s wielding a butcher knife with an 8-inch blade and a single sharp point.

Working for homicide, you would think things got a little more interesting, but, again, literally ninety percent of the cases are people shooting each other for stupid reasons. The other ten percent involve knives, cars, and, sometimes but rarely, over-the-counter rat poison.

New York City is not much like advertised on TV, except for the part where there’s a lot of tall buildings in Manhattan, downtown traffic is a nightmare, and everyone walks faster than anywhere else in the US, probably the world. Also, the subway system is decrepit, and you can’t spit without hitting a Starbucks.

Magnus has lived in the city for fifteen out of his thirty-two years, but he wasn’t born here, didn’t grow up here, and he refuses to be a real New Yorker. He’s too nice, too polite, and he knows how to dress in shades other than black, blue, and gray on the 345 days of the year when Fashion Week isn’t in town.

Case in point: his suit today is a subtle shade of maroon, his shirt is a pale jade, and the half-inch heels on his tan leather boots refuse to be quiet on principle.

“Bane!”

He turns around and faces the owner of the acerbic bark with a disarming smile.

“Good morning, Captain Garroway. Coffee?” He raises a carrier with four to-go cups from his favorite privately owned coffee shop. “I also put a box of pastries in the lunch room. If you hurry there might still be a kruller for you.”

Captain Luke Garroway furrows his bushy black brows over his dark brown eyes and grumbles something into his groomed black beard that Magnus chooses not to hear. He still takes the cup with his name on it from Magnus’s carrier and heads off in the direction of the interrogation rooms.

“Meet me in the observation room when you’re done flirting with my daughter.”

Magnus is one hundred percent sure the only reason Luke makes that joke is because he thinks Magnus is gay. His fondness for smoky eyeliner and dark nail polish might have something to do with that.

“Will do,” Magnus chirps happily before he heads in the opposite direction.

The area in front of Luke’s office is defined by a large L-shaped desk with a reception counter. The young woman who owns the semi-hidden cluttered space behind it calls it her domain. Everyone else refers to it as “Clary’s Lair”.

Clary Fairchild, the captain’s 19-year-old daughter, is the only administrative aide at the station, and they will have to lie, steal, beg, and bribe to be allowed to keep her the next time budget season rolls around.

“Good morning, biscuit,” Magnus says sweetly, placing the cup with her name on it on the counter.

The messy bun of red hair he’s talking to tips back from the paperwork on the desk just far enough for Clary to see where to reach for the cup.

Magnus cringes as she moans in pure delight at the first sip. She takes her black coffee with so much sugar that the stir stick stands up straight.

“I also brought you your favorite.”

He holds a small brown paper bag around the corner of her desk like he’s passing her drugs. Clary sticks her freckled button nose into the bag and pulls it back with a blinding smile. Her bright green eyes sparkle.

“You’re my favorite,” she says emphatically before she pulls out a corner of her fresh apple turnover and takes a moaning bite.

Magnus chuckles. “Remember that when my next report hits your inbox riddled with typos.”

“I always do.”

Her mouth is so full he only understands the words because it’s not the first time they’ve traded this joke.

Magnus leaves her with a wink and heads over to his desk, where his partner is telling his flat screen monitor to do things to itself with an arcane torture implement that are unsavory and also impossible, considering it is an inanimate piece of equipment lacking the proper orifices.

Detective Raphael Santiago is young, passionate about his work, and wound tighter than a jack-in-the-box spring. He’s also very quick to threaten oddly specific outlandish acts of violence when things don’t go his way.

“What did it do now?” Magnus asks by way of greeting, placing the third cup from his carrier on the corner of the desk.

“The chinga—”

“Eh! Language.” Magnus interrupts him with a stern look and gently nudges the cup closer to Raphael’s clenched fist.

It’s chai today. He doubts it will help, but he won’t stop trying.

“The _thing_ refuses to let me open the attachment on the email from the coroner. It’s like with every update this stupid operating system is making it harder to get anything done.”

“Let me see.”

Magnus quickly circumvents the computer’s hyper-sensitive security warning app and opens the attachment. Then he grimaces at the picture on Page 1.

“Maybe the operating system was right. Damn, that’s gruesome.”

“Eh! Language,” says Raphael in a tone that doesn’t sound anything like Magnus. He picks up his cup with a pointed quirk of dark eyebrows and takes a sip. His face screws up and he almost spits it out. 

“What is this stuff?”

“Chai,” Magnus says distractedly, scrolling through the coroner’s report. “What is this?”

“Our newest case,” Raphael replies with a sigh. He takes another sip and makes a face like he’s trying to decide if he hates it or can tolerate it.

Magnus keeps scrolling.

_The victim suffered multiple lacerations to the torso, arms, and legs from an unidentified weapon prior to being beheaded, likely by the same weapon. In addition, the victim sustained multiple deep puncture wounds to the back from a separate unidentified weapon. Analysis of the victim’s blood revealed contamination with an unidentified glutinous black substance._

“Huh.”

The reason why actual statistics involve decimal points is because things rarely break down as neatly as you would like. Magnus hasn’t seen much of this case, but he can already tell he’s looking at that 0.01 percent.

“Is this why Luke wants to see me in the observation room?”

“Yeah,” Raphael says, taking a third and final sip from his tea before he dumps the rest of it in the trashcan under his desk. “Responding officers picked up two persons of interest on the scene. One male, one female. No ID. Luke wants us to do the interviews.”

Magnus nods. “Can you print out a copy of this report?”

“If it’ll let me.” Raphael sneers at his monitor with a threatening glare.

Magnus snickers and quickly holds down Ctrl and P on the keyboard, bringing up the print menu.

“Should be fine from here.”

“Thanks,” Raphael grumbles. “I’ll catch up with you when I have it.”

“Don’t tell Clary I showed you that.”

Magnus walks away with a smile, pulls the final to-go cup from the carrier, and dumps the cardboard crate into the paper recycle bin on his way down the hall.

He takes a couple of sips and straightens his shoulders before he walks through the dove-gray door between Interrogation Rooms 1 and 2.

The observation room is really just an oversized storage closet with large one-way mirrors on either side and a bunch of audio and video equipment from the early 2000s cramped onto a bookcase against the far wall between them. Luke’s enormous frame takes up almost all the free space, leaving Magnus to squeeze uncomfortably around the single plastic chair just to be able to close the door behind him.

“Let’s make this quick before I start to develop claustrophobia.”

Luke rolls his eyes. “Did Raphael show you the coroner’s report?”

Magnus nods. “Yeah, I got a quick look at it. He’ll be over with it in a minute. Technical issues.”

Luke grunts. “We have two POIs. I want you two to work them separately then switch, see if you can trip them up and get something useful.”

“Did they say anything so far?”

“Nothing.”

The tell-tale pulse in Luke’s jaw makes it clear how much that ticks him off.

“Nothing?” Magnus asks, just to clarify if Luke is being literal or figurative.

“They haven’t said a single word since the officers told them to raise their hands.” 

“Did we check if they’re hearing disabled or don’t speak English?”

Luke exhales a disgruntled snort and braces his hands on his hips, taking up even more space in the cramped room.

“No, we just grabbed them and threw them into the back of a squad car.”

Magnus is very uncomfortable with the fact that he can’t tell if Luke is being sarcastic.

“They followed the police officers’ verbal instructions in English, and they didn’t resist arrest. They’re just not saying anything.”

That makes Magnus feel marginally better. “Okay.”

He turns to look through the one-way mirror on his left.

The girl is ridiculously beautiful. She’s young, too, but it’s hard to tell her exact age because her face is caked with layers of makeup. Her lipstick is bright red, and the thick curves of her dark eyelashes are framed with sharp lines of liquid black eyeliner. Dark brown eyes. Her unnatural complexion is just one or two shades away from liquid-paper white. Her waist-length hair is black. She’s sporting the type of tight-and-shiny outfit you would wear to an underground club. There are no visible stains on her clothing.

The door to the observation room bangs into his back. Magnus almost spills his coffee as he stumbles forward and turns around with a glare.

“Oh, no way. Three’s too big a crowd in here.”

He steps out into the hallway before Raphael can try to squeeze into the observation room with him and Luke.

“Did you bring the coroner’s report?”

“Yeah. Here’s your copy.”

Raphael hands him one of two manila folders. It has a neat label on the tab and the sheets inside have been collated and stapled. The separately printed photographs are helpfully on top. Magnus accepts it with a smirk.

“Clary helped you.”

Raphael narrows his eyes but doesn’t say anything because Luke whistles sharply through his teeth from inside the observation room.

“Get in there and see if you can get anything out of these two. This case is creepy, which means it’s click-bait, which means if we don’t solve it fast, I’ll have the higher-ups and the press breathing down my neck in no time.”

“No worries, boss,” Magnus says with a bright smile. “We’ve got this.” He turns to Raphael. “I’ll take the girl first.”

Raphael makes a face. “Why?”

Magnus rolls his eyes. “Because like it or not, young girls go ga-ga over tall, dark, and broody, so I want her primed to think about the case before she sees you and starts to babble her little heart out.”

Raphael makes a face that is even more disgruntled than the previous one.

“Interrogation Room 2,” Magnus says, twiddling his fingers in a shoo-motion. “Go.”

Before Raphael can protest, Magnus strides into Interrogation Room 1 to meet Snow White and set her up for her inevitable confrontation with Prince Not-So-Charming.

The first thing he notices is that the girl doesn’t look up when he enters the room. She keeps staring at her folded hands on top of the table in front of her.

The metal furniture is bolted to the floor and notoriously uncomfortable. She hasn’t shifted at all since Magnus looked at her through the one-way mirror two minutes ago. 

He sighs and sits down on the bolted chair across the table from her. He places the coroner’s report open in front of him and takes a sip from his coffee.

“I’m Magnus,” he says conversationally. “Detective Magnus Bane if you want to be official, but I tend not to be too strict with minors.”

She doesn’t twitch. Normally, they twitch when he reads them correctly.

“What’s your name?” he asks bluntly.

She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t raise her head. She doesn’t move at all.

Magnus uses the silence to take a closer look.

Her skin is pale even where it’s not covered with makeup. Thick lines of silvery scars are scattered over her bare arms, at the base of her throat, and even across the center of her chest.

It hits Magnus with the worst kind of clench in the stomach: this girl has been through some bad stuff. He suddenly wishes he had brought a pastry from the lunch room. She doesn’t even have a glass of water.

He puts down his coffee and gets up. “I’ll be right back.”

Luke nearly flies out of the observation room to stop him in the hallway.

“What are you doing?”

“Going with my gut,” Magnus snaps back. “How often do you see a teenage girl who’s so hard-boiled she doesn’t even flinch when she’s stuck in an interrogation room with a guy twice her age asking questions?”

“You really think she’s a minor?” Luke asks hesitantly.

“She’s seventeen at most,” snarls Magnus on his way down the hall.

“Until we know otherwise,” Luke barks after him, “she’s eighteen if she’s a day!”

Magnus comes back a couple minutes later with a plain sugar donut and a plastic cup of half-decent hot chocolate from the machine in the lunch room. He puts his offering down in front of Snow White and settles back into the chair across the table.

“Look, I don’t know what happened,” he says, closing the coroner’s report, “or how you got mixed up in it, but I want to help you.”

Whatever happened to this girl, she doesn’t fit the profile of a person who can slice up and behead a 185-pound 30-year-old Caucasian male with any type of weapon.

Right now, she’s in custody for refusing to identify herself when she was found near a crime scene, and Magnus intends to use his limited time for something more productive than trying to get an unlikely confession.

“I mean it,” he says sincerely, “but I can’t help you if I don’t even know who you are.”

The girl raises her eyes. Her long dark lashes don’t blink once as she slowly moves her hand.

Magnus stays perfectly still, waiting to see what she does.

She grabs his coffee cup where he left it and slowly pulls it toward her. She removes the plastic lid and takes a sip, leaving a red lipstick stain on the rim of the paper cup.

Magnus smiles. “It’s not very sweet and it’s probably cold by now. I brought you hot chocolate and a donut.”

She glances at the small plastic cup and the sugar ring on top of the paper napkin. Then she takes another sip from Magnus’s cold coffee. Splash of coconut milk. No sugar.

Magnus sighs.

“You know,” he says quietly, “your parents are probably worried about you.”

The paper cup stops mid-sip. A huff of breath bounces off the inside-wall before she finishes the rest of the coffee. She puts the empty cup down and pushes it away.

“They’re not the type to be worried?” Magnus surmises from the small reaction.

The girl regards him with a blank expression before she folds her hands in front of her on the table and lowers her head back down to stare at them.

“Damn,” he says, “I’d love to know who taught you that.” 

She doesn’t look up, but her fingers tighten their grip around each other. Magnus can see that she’s biting her lip.

If they had all the time in the world, he would wait her out. However, they only have twenty-four hours to charge their persons of interest with something or let them go.

Magnus picks up his folder and gets up.

“I’ll be back in a little bit.”

Maybe Raphael can get something out of her.

Magnus is well aware of his “old guy” status in the eyes of people under twenty and willing to do whatever it takes to get this kid to open up to someone, even if it’s under the influence of a misguided crush.

He meets his partner in the hallway outside the observation room. Luke is sitting inside the cramped room on the plastic chair, arms crossed as he glares at both of them through the open door.

“No luck then,” Magnus says immediately.

“Nothing,” Raphael rumbles with a sneer. “The guy won’t even look at me.” 

“Trade you.”

Magnus claps Raphael on the arm with his manila folder as they pass each other to switch interviewees. At the last second, he turns around and grabs his partner’s elbow.

“Be nice,” he says firmly. “I don’t know what happened, but that girl has been through some bad stuff. She needs someone to make her feel safe.”

Raphael’s brows furrow. “That’s not my job.”

Magnus grits his teeth. “Serve and _protect,_ remember?”

Raphael rolls his eyes and heads around the corner to the door for Interrogation Room 1.

Magnus clenches his fingers around the manila folder in his hands and plows ahead into Interrogation Room 2.

The guy doesn’t look up either. Due to the layout of the room, he is seated with his back to the door, the one-way mirror on his left, and nothing but blank wall ahead. He has a thick mop of black hair, and his fairly broad shoulders don’t show any sign of reaction to Magnus’s entrance. His long legs reach the other side of the table. His black T-shirt looks stained. There’s a gash at the seam of the left sleeve.

Magnus closes his eyes and suppresses a curse. He forcefully stops his mind from spinning a story. It’s far too easy to come up with stories when you’ve been doing this job for a while.

He takes a deep breath and steps around the table, ready to take a crack at whoever tall, dark, and – he sighs.

Handsome. Of course, he’s handsome. Though, that’s not exactly the right term.

_Pretty Boy_ is what rockets through Magnus’s mind when he gets his first good look at the guy’s face.

Finely chiseled features with long, dark brows and soft, wide lips, and a pair of gorgeous eyes that seem to shift between blue and hazel in the overhead lights. 

The storybook inside Magnus’s head flies open.

Snow White meets Prince Charming at a club. Drugs and alcohol ensue. Some old dragon pushes his luck with Snow. Prince Charming loses his shit and slays the monster for his princess.

No. He’s not going to let his overactive imagination carry him off in a particular direction when he doesn’t even have a name yet.

Magnus slaps the manila folder down on the table and braces his hands on the back of the chair bolted to the floor in front of him.

“All right, pretty boy,” he drawls. He notices the guy laces his long fingers more tightly in front of him. Interesting. “Tell me your story.”

Cold eyes under troubled brows rise to glance at him before they return to the shiny surface of the table.

“No?” Magnus says, feeling an irrational anger start to creep in. “How about I make one up and you tell me if I got it right?”

No reaction.

“You and Snow meet. It’s love at first sight.”

The left corner of the guy’s plush mouth twitches. Magnus is on to something.

“Hearts all a-flutter, you two are going to kiss and ride off into the sunrise, but suddenly there’s a guy in the way. He gets rude, things get out of control, and you’re hopped up on so much fairy dust and rage, you end up literally beheading the monster.”

The guy’s eyes shift up and to the left before they move back down. He stares at his hands. The linked fingers have relaxed their grip.

“No?” Magnus says again.

“Then how about this? Snow and her dad are just trying to get home, when the big bad wolf – that’s you – jumps out of the darkness and attacks. You manage to maul her dad, but police show up before you can get to her.”

It’s bullshit. The two were taken into custody together. They’re exhibiting the same defensive behaviors. They’re not strangers.

“Look,” Magnus says coldly. “Things are not looking good for you right now.”

He opens the coroner’s report and turns it around, pointing at the gory picture on Page 1.

“I have a murder victim, headless and carved up like a Christmas turkey, and you were picked up at the crime scene. Now you’re sitting in front of me with a torn and bloody shirt.”

The guy looks at the photograph without any type of reaction. There’s no flinching, no disgust, no immediate rejection of the reality in front of him. It’s like he’s looking at the bland cover of a generic greeting card rather than the gruesome image of a mutilated corpse.

Magnus gets the cold and frightening notion that he’s dealing with a psychopath. The story that starts to spin in his mind is a deadly version of Beauty and the Beast. 

He can feel the ice crawl through his veins as he looks down at the beautiful monster in front of him.

Magnus leans forward, sound judgement clouded by sudden intense emotion. His voice drops to a menacing whisper that’s low enough not to carry further than the few inches between their faces.

“If you’re the one who scarred the girl—"

Stormy eyes fly up to meet his gaze. All the emotions that were lacking before burst across the angelic features. There’s fear, and rage, and a wild determination to act recklessly that Magnus recognizes from his rookie days. There is also a large Z-shaped scar crossing the left side of the guy’s neck.

“Where’s Izzy?”

Magnus narrows his eyes and smiles coldly. Now he has a name.

“Izzy?” He tilts his head. “Short for Isabelle?”

The guy clamps his mouth shut and sits back with his arms crossed in front of his chest.

Experience tells Magnus he’s not going to get anything else right now.

He leaves the room, intending to get the new information to Raphael as quickly as possible.

His partner is coming around the corner as Magnus flies out of the door next to the observation room.

“I got a name!” he announces.

Raphael stops and clicks his tongue. “So did I.”

“He called her Izzy,” Magnus plows ahead. “What did she say?”

Raphael rolls his eyes and imitates the tone and mannerisms of a snotty brat. “Where’s Alec?”

Magnus can feel his eyes light up. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

“We can run their names through Missing Persons.”

“I’ll do you one better.”

Raphael holds up Magnus’s empty to-go cup at the bottom edge. The bright red lipstick stain at the top is facing Magnus.

“We can take her fingerprints and run them through the system. See if she’s got priors.”

“If you two are done preening,” says Luke, stepping out of the observation room. “I’ll get this to Alaric.” He plucks the cup from Raphael’s hand. “You two get back in there. We’re gonna need more than their names to crack this can of worms.” He points a long, admonishing finger in Magnus’s face. “And you are about to get slapped with a mandatory re-training in interrogation techniques. Making up fairy tales, really.” He rolls his eyes as he walks away.

“It got him to talk, didn’t it?” Magnus calls after Luke with a chipper smile.

Magnus returns to Interrogation Room 2 with a spring in his step. He’s a little bit closer to getting a handle on the guy. He’ll crack him. By the end of the day, he’ll have bagged this beautiful monster.

“Okay, pretty boy,” he drawls as he slides back around the table. “Oh, how rude of me. I should call you Alec. Or is it Alexander?”

A flinch goes through the broad shoulders and tightly crossed arms, but when Alec raises his head, there is nothing but cold defiance in his expression.

“Where’s Izzy?”

It occurs to Magnus that the guy should be handcuffed to the table. 

“She’s here. She’s safe. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Where’s Izzy?”

Magnus almost rolls his eyes closed, but he resists the urge. He’s not letting that one out of his sight for a second.

“She’s in Interrogation Room 1. Right around the corner, talking to my partner, so you might want to start talking, too.”

It happens so fast that Magnus doesn’t even have time to blink in shock.

Alec is out of his chair and behind Magnus. In front of them, a shimmering vortex the size of a door swirls into existence. Alec pushes him toward it with a thick forearm around his throat and an iron grip around his left wrist, forcing Magnus’s arm high up against his back.

“Take me there. Interrogation Room 1. Take me to Izzy.”

Magnus takes a milli-second to breathe, assess the situation, and form a plan. As Alec forces his steps past the threshold of the vortex, he stomps his boot heel down on the guy’s foot and jams the elbow of his free arm back into the guy’s stomach.

Alec’s grip falters and Magnus uses the opportunity to grab the muscled forearm in front of his throat, twist it around and reverse their positions.

They’re inside the vortex, and Magnus tries to take a step back, but he can’t seem to remember which way is back and which is forward. His mind starts to spin as the swirling colors in front of his eyes turn his stomach.

“No!” Alec screams.

A thick, hard skull cracks right across the bridge of Magnus’s nose and the explosive pain is the last thing he’s aware of before everything goes dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you guys know that "chai" was just the hindi word for tea? I didn't. Thanks "too_mentally_unstable_to_live" for letting me know. Fixed!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all the lovely comments and kudos. I hope you continue to enjoy the story.
> 
> ###### 

It’s still dark the next time Magnus opens his eyes. A splitting headache blooms from the bridge of his nose all the way to the back of his head.

“Bastard broke my nose,” he grumbles into the darkness as he reaches gingerly for the sore appendage.

“It’s fine. I checked.”

Alec didn’t use the opportunity to escape. Odd.

“Where are we?” Magnus asks, because he honestly can’t tell by looking at his surroundings.

“Not in Limbo,” Alec says. “No thanks to you.”

Magnus has no idea what that is supposed to mean. He’s not in the mood to play word games.

“I didn’t ask where we aren’t, I asked where we are.”

Magnus gets up, fighting a nauseating bout of vertigo, and forces himself to look around through narrowed eyes, waiting for his vision to adjust to the darkness.

They’re definitely indoors. No exits or windows that he can see. Musty air. Moldy brick walls. Concrete support beams. The Beauty and the Beast vibe is back. This time it’s the 80s TV-drama with the chick from Terminator.

“Did you drag me into the subway tunnels?”

Magnus chuckles and shakes his head. He tries to figure out how one guy could drag an unconscious detective out of a fully manned police station, into the street, down a service hole, and into the subway tunnels without anyone stopping him. There is no way.

The last thing Magnus remembers is his close-quarter struggle with Alec in Interrogation Room 2.

Inside a vortex of shiny colors that appeared out of nowhere.

“What the hell was that thing?” he asks sharply. “That vortex.”

When he doesn’t get an answer, he suspects Alec is gone. He still can’t see him. The surroundings are getting a little bit clearer though. There is light coming from a far away source down the tunnel. Magnus hopes it’s not literally a train.

“A portal.”

“Jesus!”

Magnus whirls around swinging and gets his fist caught in an iron grip.

Alec is looking at him with thinly veiled anger and naked determination. The grip around Magnus’s fist tightens.

“I only have one more,” he rumbles, “so if you want to get back to your mundane life, you’ll help me use it to retrieve my sister.”

Magnus stares at him.

“A portal?” he says, while his brain also picks up the words ‘sister’, and ‘mundane life’, filing them away for later. “That’s more ludicrous than my working theory.” He cocks his head to the side. “How does it work?”

“Magic,” Alec says bluntly.

“Magic?”

Something feels off when Magnus uses the word. It’s an uncomfortable sensation like a pair of slacks that’s just a little too snug in the crotch.

Alec makes an impatient noise in his throat. When he tilts his head, his eyes gleam in the darkness. It really makes him look like a beautiful monster.

“All you need to know,” he says in a tone struggling for calm, “is that you can walk through the portal right into Interrogation Room 1. Just close your eyes, think firmly about Interrogation Room 1, and take one step after another until you’re there.”

Magnus blinks. He does not say the words on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he puts a smile on his face.

“Or we can both follow this tunnel to a working subway station, get back to the precinct, and continue our conversation about what happened to the Christmas turkey.”

“You’re insane,” says Alec, dropping Magnus’s fist.

“Hah! I was going to tell you that.”

“I want my sister,” Alec insists.

“I want to solve my case,” Magnus snaps back.

Alec grinds his teeth, causing the muscle in his jaw to twitch. Magnus bats his lashes with a facetious smile.

“The Christmas turkey was possessed.”

Magnus stops batting his lashes with his eyes closed.

“What?”

He hears Alec take a deep breath through his nose, and Magnus just knows whatever comes out of that pretty mouth next is going to be nuttier than squirrel shit.

“He was possessed by a lower demon and running amok around Midtown. We had no choice.” 

Magnus sighs. It’s a long, loud one made up of ninety percent resignation and ten percent “why-me?”. He opens his eyes and looks at the beautiful monster who just confessed to killing a man with the help of his undoubtedly underage sister.

“What drugs did you take?”

“You don’t believe me.” Alec’s voice is hard and unsurprised.

“You’re making up stories about magic and demons! Of course, I don’t believe you!”

There is that uncomfortable pinch again. He doesn’t remember ever feeling it before.

Then again, Magnus has never really had anything to do with magic – pinch – in his life. He can’t remember ever taking a real interest in fantasy or sci-fi. He doesn’t know anything about fairy tales beyond the in-your-face Disney stuff. He’s never actually read the original medieval stories.

“…prove it if I still had my stele.”

“Huh? Kid, you’re not making any sense,” Magnus says with more exasperation than he meant to let slip.

“I’m not a kid. I’m nineteen.”

Magnus makes a pained noise as his gut clenches with the information. Still a kid, really, but legally they’re going to try him like an adult. Which they should, because no matter how young or beautiful he is, Alec slaughtered another person in cold blood with a …

“What was the weapon?”

“Huh?”

Magnus can’t help it. He needs to know right now as much as he needs to double-check that his socks match before he puts them on in the morning. It’s a thing.

“The murder weapon, what was it?”

“Um.”

“Tell me, Alexander,” Magnus barks and is surprised when Alec actually jerks back.

“Which one?”

Magnus glares at the stupid, pretty boy with all the exasperation and irrational anger that is coursing through his veins.

Right. Lacerations and puncture wounds.

“Both.”

Alec swallows. “I used a bow and broadhead arrows.”

Magnus narrows his eyes. That explains the puncture wounds, but not the long, shallow cuts and the beheading.

“How did you take his head off?”

Alec’s gaze turns to the grimy ground beneath his feet. “With a whip.”

“A…”

So. Many. Questions. Magnus chokes them down and picks the most important one. Evidence.

“Where are the weapons now?”

Alec clamps his mouth shut with a fierce glower.

Magnus wants to smack the boy and drag him back to the station by his ridiculously attractive mop of thick black hair. This case is going to be the end of his mediocre career with the NYPD. He just knows it.

“Look,” he says with a calm breeziness he doesn’t feel. “If you want me to take you back to your sister, you’re going to have to give me something.” 

Alec grits his teeth before he answers. “I ditched the bow and quiver, but they took the whip at the police station.”

Magnus would have heard about that when he passed by intake this morning. The officer on duty is a notorious blabbermouth.

“Don’t lie to me,” he snarls.

“I don’t lie.” Alec’s expression is thunderous. “They took it from Izzy before they separated us.”

“Your sister had the whip.”

The implication behind that makes the blood drain from Magnus’s face. His stomach roils and his knees go weak. He’s not sure if he’s going to pass out or start vomiting.

When his ears stop ringing and his senses come back to him, Alec’s big hand is firm and warm on his shoulder.

“She’s not a kid either,” he says as blandly as a soldier talking about his last deployment in the Middle East.

Magnus looks up into the earnest eyes meeting his dead on. Whatever else this kid – young man? – in front of him is, he is one hundred percent serious about every word coming out of his mouth.

“Your sister beheaded a man who was possessed by a demon.”

The words come out like a bad line-reading from a B-movie horror script.

“Yes.”

“And then you got picked up by the police?”

“Yes.”

“And then you tried to break the two of you out by using a magic—” Magnus winces at the pinch. “Portal, but instead you brought us here.” He points both of his index fingers at the ground between his unsteady feet.

“Yes.”

“And now you want to use another m… portal to return to the station and bring your sister back here?” He points at the ground again.

“Yes.”

“And how am I supposed to explain any of this to my captain?!”

Magnus throws his hands up and takes deep, rolling breaths, struggling to stop himself from battering the obstinately serious, ridiculously beautiful, insane monster in front of him.

“I don’t know.”

What a perfectly teenage thing to say. Except Magnus doesn’t know either, and he hasn’t been a teenager in over a decade.

A thought occurs to him.

“How long was I out?”

Alec shrugs. “Five minutes, maybe ten.”

The window of opportunity is rapidly closing. Luke could decide to come back to the observation room at any time. Raphael’s patience is notoriously short-lived. He will come looking for Magnus as soon as he is done putting up with whatever attitude the girl, Izzy, is giving him at the moment.

Magnus can’t believe he’s actually calculating his chances of successfully doing what Alec has asked of him.

Alec is giving him a look like the world is in peril and Magnus is his only hope and he hates having to ask. 

“Will you help me save my sister?”

“Save her?” Magnus laughs.

If there was ever a girl that didn’t need saving, it’s the deadly dark-haired beauty that goes by the misleadingly cutesy moniker of Izzy. In fact, Magnus’s biggest impulse to go back stems from worrying about his partner, Raphael. 

“Okay, yeah,” he says with a distracted nod. “We’re going back.”

He can figure out how to explain things later. Right now, he just needs to make sure that Raphael is in one piece and then they’re going to put Hansel and Gretel, demon slayers, behind bars ASAP.

“Where are you going?”

Alec’s voice stops him about ten feet along the dark, dilapidated tunnel.

“Back to the precinct,” Magnus says waspishly.

Alec rolls his eyes and catches up with him. He places one hand firmly on Magnus’s shoulder and uses the other to throw something into the air ahead of them.

A vortex of shimmering colors swirls into existence, glowing brightly in the surrounding darkness.

“Remember,” Alec says. “Close your eyes, think firmly about Interrogation Room 1, and then just keep walking until I tell you we’re there.”

Magnus turns his head to stare at him in disbelief, but Alec is glowering so stoically that Magnus can’t help but roll his shoulders, close his eyes, and humor the stupid pretty boy so they can get this over with.

No more than five steps later, Alec shouts his sister’s name in a loud, angry bark.

Magnus rips his eyes open and stares at the wall by the entrance of Interrogation Room 1, where Raphael is trapped with his back to the door and his hands up at his sides.

Alec’s sister is pressed against him with her full body, her tiny hands shackling Raphael’s wrists to the wall, slinky hips gyrating and grinding into him.

“Izzy!” Alec barks again.

“What?”

When the girl pulls back and turns to her brother, Magnus gets a good look at Raphael’s face.

His partner looks poleaxed and terrified. The lower half of his face is smeared with bright red lipstick like he’s been attacked by a messy vampire. His arms are still pressed up against the wall beside him.

“We’re leaving!”

Magnus feels a brush of soft cotton and hard muscle against his arm. Then a brush of long black hair against his face.

The portal closes behind him before he can turn around.

Alec and Izzy are gone.

As Raphael’s eyes move to Magnus, his gaze changes from a glazed look of shock to a furious glower.

“Next time,” he growls, wiping brutally at his mouth, “I’m not dealing with the girl.”

Magnus nods dumbly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for the lovely feedback and the many kudos. Keep them coming, I'd love to hear what you think.
> 
> ###### 

Hours later, Magnus and Raphael sit in a quiet corner of their favorite pub, commiserating over pints about their crazy day. Raphael only stopped compulsively wiping his mouth about an hour ago after he’d finished his first beer. Magnus can’t make heads nor tails of it all, but his mind won’t stop churning.

“I still don’t understand how,” he says. “I mean, one moment I’m in Interrogation Room 2, struggling with the guy. Then we’re in a subway tunnel. Then we’re back at the precinct in Interrogation Room 1, where you’re being molested by a little girl. Then like that.” He snaps his fingers. “They’re just gone.”

Their captain was furious. In the moment, Luke went so far as to threaten Magnus and Raphael with charges for aiding escape and hindering prosecution, but they both stood very still and explained, more or less truthfully, that they had neither aided nor hindered anything.

The video surveillance showed exactly what had transpired.

During their interrogation, Alec and Magnus engaged in a struggle and disappeared from the middle of Interrogation Room 2 inside a vortex of swirling colors.

Ten minutes later in Interrogation Room 1, Izzy ambushed Raphael on his way out the door, adding sexual assault to her rap-sheet.

Two minutes after that, another vortex of swirling colors appeared in the middle of Interrogation Room 1, spitting out Magnus and Alec with Alec’s heavy hand on Magnus’s shoulder.

Then Alec and Izzy brushed past a stunned Magnus into the vortex and disappeared into thin air.

None of them had a clue how to file a report on any of that. So, they didn’t.

The case is still open. Two persons of interest known only by their nick-names are considered at large. Their previously confiscated possessions are still in evidence lockup.

Recording of interviews and interrogations is not mandatory in the state of New York, so officially the surveillance footage never existed. That one had been Luke’s call, which had surprised Magnus more than anything.

Magnus takes a large gulp from his beer and licks his lips. He can’t shake the feeling that he shouldn’t keep digging, but he can’t stop digging either. He raises his eyes from his glass to look at Raphael, trying to figure out how to best bring up the subject.

“You’re Catholic, right?” he says.

Raphael narrows his eyes. “Yes.”

“Just,” Magnus says, turning his glass between his fingers, “how Catholic are we talking? I mean, on a scale from buffet-Christian to the pope.”

The suspicious squint turns into a warning glare. “What are you getting at?”

Magnus stops twisting the glass between his fingers and pins Raphael with a look.

“Do you believe that God, and Hell, and Angels, and Demons, and all that stuff is actually real?” He can practically hear the capital letters his tone has added to the terms.

Raphael’s face sours. “I can distinguish metaphor from plain-speech.”

“What if it’s not?” Magnus rushes out. “Metaphor.” 

Raphael shifts in his seat. His shoulders stiffen. He looks at the beer in Magnus’s hand.

“This is only your second,” he says slowly, “so I know you’re not drunk.”

“Alec told me that the victim was possessed by a demon.”

Raphael scowls. Then he scoffs.

“Alec told you?” He stresses the name with raised brows. “What, did he tell you he was a valiant knight who killed the demon to save his virgin bride? Come on, Magnus.”

Magnus digs his heels in and glares at Raphael. “She’s his sister.”

“You didn’t tell Luke that.”

“It didn’t come up.”

Raphael’s face goes blank.

Magnus takes another gulp from his beer to settle his stomach.

“According to Alec, she’s the one who actually killed the guy. With a whip.”

Raphael laughs out loud, nearly spilling his beer in the process. He’s usually not that clumsy.

“Does she also have a magical crystal skull or the stones from the temple of doom?”

Magnus waits for the pinch, but it doesn’t come. Apparently, it only materializes when he himself says or thinks the word magic – pinch. There it is. 

“I’m not playing, Raphael.” Magnus waves his free hand in an erratic gesture. “You saw the portal. You watched them disappear into thin air just like I did.” He puts his glass down a little too hard. “She had you pinned against the wall.”

Raphael flinches. “I was surprised.”

“She’s ninety pounds soaking wet.”

“She was all up in my face. What was I supposed to do? Throw her across the room?”

“I’m sorry.” Magnus relents. “Sorry.” He says again. “That wasn’t fair to you.”

“Don’t make it a habit,” Raphael grumbles.

They stare at each other in grumpy silence for a moment before Magnus tries again.

“I believe him.”

“Why?”

“Because he dragged me through a swirling portal into the subway tunnels under Manhattan, confessed to a murder in order to protect his sister, dragged me through another portal back into the precinct, and disappeared into thin air right in front of my eyes.”

Raphael raises his eyebrows. “And the fact that he’s objectively attractive and exactly your type has nothing to do with it?”

“He’s not…” Magnus knows better than to deny the truth. “He’s nineteen.”

“See, I don’t like that.” Raphael bares his teeth in a grimace. “That’s not a no. Can you give me an honest no?”

Magnus can feel the muscles in his own face tighten with impatience.

“Does it really make a difference?”

“I don’t like the way you said that, either.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to get to the bottom of this case as much as I do?”

Raphael picks up his glass and finishes his beer in a very grumpy fashion. He puts the empty glass down on the table and glares at Magnus.

“I’m still not buying into literal demons running around Manhattan.” 

After parting ways with Raphael outside the pub, Magnus goes with his gut and takes a ride-share to an address near the crime scene. He gets out of the car and walks a couple blocks down the well-lit Midtown streets.

It’s Midtown. Bryant Park. Times Square. Broadway. Hotels and the Hard Rock Café. There is zero chance for a demon to run amok at any time of the day or night without being seen by literally millions of tourists and locals.

Except for the places that nobody goes because there’s nothing to see or buy.

Magnus turns off of 39th into an alley between two old high-rises. He knows he’s less than a block from Bryant Park. 

The crime scene isn’t even marked off with tape anymore. The guys collecting evidence have come and gone and the alley is a through-way for delivery trucks and fire engines.

It’s badly lit, out of sight. A good place to drive someone into a corner and kill them without being seen.

Magnus closes his eyes and releases an impressive string of profanity directed at Alec and the situation in general.

“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

Magnus spins around with a glare that is fifty-fifty between pissed off and incredulous. 

Alec is standing less than twenty feet away from him. He’s dressed in black. A different T-shirt. The same jeans and boots. A compound bow and quiver are strapped to his back, peeking over his right shoulder.

Magnus clenches his fists with a snarl of frustration.

“And coming back to the crime scene with one of the murder weapons is incredibly stupid.”

“I can’t glamour things anymore,” Alec says with a shrug, “and I was following you.”

“Oh, you wanted me to personally arrest you. I’m flattered.”

Magnus steps forward, reaching for the handcuffs at the back of his belt.

“Stop!” Faster than light, Alec has drawn his bow, broadhead arrow nocked and aiming at Magnus, center mass. “Don’t draw a gun.”

Magnus freezes. “I wasn’t going to.”

“Remove your hands from your belt,” Alec says, “slowly.”

Magnus does as he’s told. He does have a gun, and he could make a move for it, but he doesn’t want to.

“I was reaching for the handcuffs,” he explains as he slowly raises his hands at his sides in a placating gesture. “I don’t like guns.”

“You’re a mundane cop,” Alec’s tone is cynical.

Magnus scoffs. “There’s no place in the handbook that says you have to like guns or draw them at every opportunity. They make people nervous.” He looks pointedly at the arrow aimed at his chest.

Alec lowers the bow.

Magnus doesn’t pretend he’s not relieved when Alec puts the arrow back into the quiver. He allows the giddy rush of a successful de-escalation to wiggle down his back.

Alec scowls at him like he’s not sure what he’s looking at.

“I need my sister’s bracelet back.”

Magnus blinks. “Sure,” he drawls, “Can I get you anything else with that? Coffee? A pastry?”

Alec smirks. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

“You are an accomplice to murder and you escaped from custody with your sister, who is the actual killer. Now you’re asking me to remove evidence so she can get her favorite fashion accessory back.”

Magnus exhales a shaky breath. He has no idea why he’s still standing here, talking, when he should arrest the guy, call for backup, and take him in.

“I told you,” Alec says calmly. “He was possessed by a demon. And the bracelet is not a fashion accessory. It’s the resting state of her whip, the only angelic weapon we still have, so we really need it back.”

“The bracelet’s the whip,” Magnus says blandly.

He raises his hands to his forehead and starts to massage his temples. He can feel the headache coming. The adrenaline rush hysteria arrives first. Magnus doubles over with laughter.

“The bracelet’s the whip,” he wheezes between tittering guffaws, “because of course it’s a magical…” Pinch. “Bracelet that turns into a razor-sharp whip when she needs to behead a demon.”

“Sometimes it turns into a staff,” Alec says, unhelpfully.

Magnus covers his face with his hands and laughs so hard he starts to cry.

“Are you okay?”

Alec is less than three feet away now. When Magnus glares up at him through blurry eyes, he can see that the guy looks genuinely concerned. It sends Magnus into another fit of giggles.

“You’re under…” He can’t even say it. “What the hell? Just what the hell?”

“If you get the bracelet, I can prove it.”

Magnus shakes his head, snickering. “How about you prove it first?”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” Magnus shrugs. “Do some magic.” Pinch. “Show me a demon.”

Alec looks uncomfortable.

“It’s too dangerous,” he says, “I wouldn’t be able to banish it without the whip, and I can’t do magic.”

“Then how did you get your hands on a magical whip?”

Magnus is starting to get used to the pinch. Maybe if he uses the word enough, it’ll wear in so to speak.

“It’s a family heirloom.”

“There are more of you?” Magnus grimaces.

“No one you’ll ever meet.” Alec scowls.

“This is insane.”

At least the hysterical laughter has subsided and Magnus can think and see clearly again. He takes a deep breath and narrows his eyes in thought.

“If it’s true,” he says, pointing his index finger in Alec’s face, “there has to be a way to prove it.”

“There is,” Alec says stubbornly. “Get the bracelet to Izzy and she’ll turn it into a whip and then a staff, right in front of your face.”

Magnus sucks in a deep breath through his nose and glares right back at the obstinate – beautiful – infuriating scowl at the end of his pointed finger.

“You are…”

He’s the perfect storm. The career killer. An actual murderer. The reason Magnus is going to end up in prison or dead in a dark alley somewhere. A beautiful monster.

“If you get me that bracelet,” Alec says, “I’ll disappear, and you’ll never have to see me or my sister again. I promise.”

“Like that’s what I want!”

Magnus’s hands fly outward in a burst of primal frustration. Somewhere in the darkness, there is a loud metallic crash, followed by the angry yowl of a cat.

Alec steps forward, unintimidated by his sudden outburst.

“Then what do you want?”

“The truth!”

“That’s all I’ve been giving you.”

“I need proof!”

“Then get me the bracelet.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my lovelies, and thanks again for all the wonderful feedback and kudos. I really can't tell you how much I appreciate them.
> 
> This chapter contains a diner scene and I just have to ramble about that for a sec. I have a big old soft spot for diner scenes. They've been cliche since the 1950s, but a good diner scene can tell you so much about the characters you're working with even without them having to say very much. You just have to do it right. I hope I did. Let me know what you think.
> 
> Oh, also Magnus commits a crime to pursue a case. Silly butterfly.
> 
> ###### 

A cold, hard stone sits in the pit of Magnus’s stomach as he walks into the precinct and down to the basement where they store evidence locked behind a wall of chain-linked steel. He doesn’t sign his name on the form at the empty desk before he punches the five-digit code into the electronic keypad to let himself in.

The lock is just that, a lock. It doesn’t log who comes and goes. There are no cameras inside the evidence locker or around it. The precinct is old and continuously low on budget. The only reason they have an electronic keypad instead of a padlock is because people kept misplacing the keys.

The cardboard box for the casefile is on a shelf toward the front. Magnus opens it up. The only pieces of evidence inside are two generic smartphones and the bracelet, each bagged in a separate resealable plastic bag. A copy of the intake form is stuffed against the inside wall of the box.

Magnus takes out the bag with the bracelet. He closes his eyes.

This is the moment.

He opens the bag, reaches into his coat pocket, and swaps the intricate silver-gold snake with a generic sterling-silver armband from Chinatown that coils around twice and has a crude snake head at the top.

Magnus leaves the evidence locker, the basement, and then the precinct, without anyone taking notice of him. He’s just a homicide detective, doing his job. Very few people, including those working for the police, know what that actually entails.

He walks the two blocks to the 24-hour diner with a cold stone in his stomach and the outline of a silver-gold snake burning through his coat pocket into his hip.

The siblings are waiting for him inside a booth facing the front entrance. They sit next to each other. They haven’t ordered anything.

Magnus’s brows furrow. There were no wallets with the evidence. No loose money or credit cards. Just the smartphones and the bracelet.

He strides down the aisle and sinks into the squeaky vinyl seat across from Alec and Izzy. She doesn’t raise her eyes from the menu on the placemat in front of her. Alec is looking at him expectantly.

“Did you bring it?”

Before Magnus can answer, a waitress is at their side, rattling off her greeting.

“Hi, my name’s Debbie. I’m your server today. The special is clam chowder and for dessert pecan pie. Can I start you off with something to drink?” 

Magnus makes a snap decision. “Coffee, all around. Give us a minute on the food.”

“Cream or sugar?”

“Cream, no sugar for her and me.” He raises his brows and glances across the table. “Alec?”

“Black is fine.”

Magnus suppresses a laugh and the urge to add a sarcastic comment about Alec’s soul. And his outfit.

Izzy snickers like she had the same thought.

The waitress leaves, and Magnus takes a look at the placemat menu in front of him.

“Go ahead and order whatever you want,” he says pleasantly. “It’s on me.”

“We’re fine,” Alec says, ending with a wince as a heavy kick rattles the table between them.

“Thank you,” Izzy says pointedly, speaking her first words in front of Magnus.

Her voice is melodious and so heartbreakingly young that Magnus wants to call her sweetheart. Then he remembers she allegedly beheaded a man with a whip less than twenty-four hours ago.

“You’re welcome.”

When the waitress gets back with their coffee, Alec orders a small salad while Izzy goes for a soda, a double cheese burger with extra fries and a side of onion rings. Magnus tries to hide his confusion behind the mug in his hands and orders the chicken fettucine alfredo.

“Did you bring it?” Alec asks again as soon as the waitress is gone.

“Yes, but we can do the show-and-tell later.” Magnus sits back and pretends to be comfortable with the stolen evidence burning a hole in his pocket. “I’m starving.”

He suspects they are.

The food arrives and Magnus keeps taking subtle glances over his fork to see how they eat. Alec picks at his salad. Izzy digs in like she hasn’t eaten in days and won’t eat again anytime soon after this meal. Despite that, she pushes the onion rings and extra fries in Alec’s direction.

Alec only picks up an onion ring after she’s repeatedly jammed the basket against his wrist.

The fierce protectiveness swings both ways. Magnus also makes a mental note that Alec has a problem accepting charity while Izzy has no such qualms.

“Okay,” Magnus says. “It’s killing me.”

Alec’s gaze turns sharp as the food drops from his fingers, forgotten.

“What is?”

“It’s just a figure of speech,” Magnus says with a chuckle. “I’m talking about you two. What’s your story?”

They share an uncomfortable glance that speaks volumes, none of which Magnus can actually read.

“Not here,” Alec says. “It’s too public.”

He makes to get up from the table while Izzy throws him a pleading look over her half-finished fries. She’s already inhaled most of the burger.

Magnus grabs Alec’s wrist to stop him.

“Sit down,” he says curtly. “I can wait until you’re finished eating.”

Alec glares at Magnus’s hand. Magnus doesn’t let go. Alec sits down.

“Thank you,” Izzy says again, muffled around a mouthful of fries.

It reminds Magnus so much of Clary that the endearment slips out after all.

“You’re welcome, sweetie.” 

After they leave the diner, Magnus follows the siblings to a back alley behind it. The emergency lights and exit signs above the fire doors are the only light coming into the area.

“All right,” he tells them, “that’s far enough.”

He’s fed them. He’s gained their trust. He’s indulged their need for a fairy tale. It’s time to get back to reality.

Magnus pulls out the bracelet and holds it up in front of Izzy.

“Show me,” he says, knowing that she won’t be able to do anything with the shiny piece of jewelry except snap it around her wrist.

She takes the bracelet from him and snaps her arm to the side.

There’s a sound like the Foley-effect from an Indiana Jones movie.

In front of him is a teenage girl dressed like a dominatrix with a whip in her outstretched hand. The long silver-gold line of it coils on the ground around her feet.

Magnus stares.

She snaps her arm again with the same sound effect and is holding a six-foot staff with the head of a hissing viper.

Magnus stares.

She bangs the end of the staff into the ground to turn it back into a whip and coils it around her wrist. The silver-gold spirals twist and contract, reverting to the shape of an intricate snake bracelet that reaches from her wrist halfway up her forearm. 

Magnus stares.

“Do you need me to do it again?” Izzy asks.

Magnus stares.

It’s real. It’s all real. Snake bracelet whips. Demons. Young girls beheading demons with snake bracelet whips. Magic.

“Magnus?” Izzy says gently.

His blood pressure drops with a violent fit of nausea and his ears are ringing.

“What’s Magnus?” asks Alec.

“That’s his name.”

It’s the last thing Magnus hears before he passes out.

When Magnus comes to, it’s with a raging headache and a lingering roil of queasiness in his stomach. He’s also lying on his own couch inside his own apartment.

“How did I get here?” he asks out loud, not expecting an answer.

“Alec carried you,” Izzy’s voice chirps from the direction of the kitchenette.

Magnus lives on the fourth floor of a six-floor walkup in Chinatown.

He sits up slowly. Holds his head. Tries not to make any sudden moves.

“How long was I out?”

He hates that he has asked that question twice in the span of a single day.

“About an hour,” Izzy says nonchalantly. “Hey, what do you call that spicy cold cabbage stuff in your fridge? I like it.”

“Kimchi.” Magnus says distractedly, glancing around his cramped living room and then over his shoulder at Izzy who is raiding his fridge. “Where’s Alec?”

“Fire escape.” Izzy says, shoveling the last of his left-over roast duck into her mouth. “He says he’s keeping a look out, but I think he’s just moping.”

“I’m not moping.”

Alec climbs in through the window. His tall frame eats up most of the limited free space between the couch, the coffee table, the armchair, and the TV. He looks angry and obstinate, which Magnus is beginning to think is his default state.

Magnus sighs. He’s stuck in his tiny one-bedroom apartment with two teenage demon killers in possession of magic weapons. Also, magic is real.

The fridge door bangs shut.

“Is there any more food?”

And one of the kids is trying to eat him out of house and home.

“I really,” says Magnus, feeling another fit of hysterical laughter coming on. “I just can’t.”

“That’s okay.” Izzy comes over and jumps onto the couch next to him, bouncing once with a brilliant smile. “If you let me borrow some money, I can go get us something. There’s a ton of places around here.”

“Isabelle.” Alec sounds more like a parent than her brother. “Stop acting like I don’t feed you.”

“I would, but you don’t.”

Magnus can see the blush starting at the back of Alec’s neck as he crosses his arms and looks at the floor.

Izzy is immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. That’s not how I meant it.”

Magnus feels himself reaching for his wallet before he’s even formed a conscious thought.

“Here,” he hands over what little cash he carries. “There’s a little grocery store right at the corner. Go there. If you don’t have enough, tell them to put the rest on Magnus Bane’s tab.”

“Thanks, Magnus. You’re awesome.”

She snatches the money from his fingers, trades it for a kiss to his cheek, and bounces off so quickly that Magnus is still sitting flummoxed on the couch when the door to his apartment bangs shut behind her.

He looks up at Alec who is standing between the window, the coffee table, and the armchair like he doesn’t know which way to bolt.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Magnus suggests in a gentle tone with a slow hand motion toward the armchair. “We can talk.”

Alec folds himself into the chair with a guarded look, both feet on the ground, and his hips turned in the direction of the window.

Magnus rolls his eyes.

“I’m not going to try to arrest you, and if you bolt, I won’t chase after you.”

That last part is a bold-faced lie, but Alec doesn’t know him well enough to tell.

Alec relaxes marginally into the cushions.

“What do you want to know?”

Magnus chuckles. “For starters? Who are you two? Where did you come from? How has nobody ever heard anything about real demons before? Where are your parents? Why are they letting their kids run around fighting demons? And where does your sister put away all the food she eats? She’s tiny, but she eats like a champion bodybuilder!”

“We’re not kids,” Alec says calmly.

Magnus pretends to inspect the flawless edges of his painted fingernails.

“How old is your sister?”

The muscle in Alec’s jaw twitches. He clenches his hands into fists.

“She’s seventeen, and she eats like that because we haven’t exactly had three square meals in a while.”

“How long is a while?” Magnus presses.

“A couple of months.”

“Where were you before that.”

“Home.”

“Home where?”

“Just home.”

Magnus bangs his head against the backrest of the couch and closes his eyes.

“You’re not going to tell me your last name either, are you?”

“It wouldn’t make a difference if I did.”

Magnus jerks his head up sharply, pouncing on the chance to take that bet.

“Then what is it?”

“Lightwood.”

“Alexander Lightwood.”

Magnus lets the name roll over his tongue. It’s not very common. Now he really has a good starting point for his investigation. He can run it through all their databases tomorrow morning and see what shakes loose.

Alec throws one of his long legs over the other and sits back with his arms crossed tightly in front of his chest.

“Don’t say it like that,” he grumbles. “It’s just Alec.”

Magnus blinks at him with a perplexed smile.

Alec’s scowl deepens.

“Fine,” Magnus drawls, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Alec.”

If anything, Alec bristles harder.

Magnus sighs. “What happened to your parents?”

“Nothing.”

Magnus groans in frustration and drums his fists into the seat cushion at his sides. Trying to get information from Alec is like trying to pull nails out of a wall with his bare fingers.

He rolls his head around to look at the beautiful, infuriating face scowling back at him and exhales long and hard.

“Just tell me what you can,” he pleads on the last ounce of breath in his lungs. “Please.”

Alec relents with the grace of a fully loaded pack mule forced to climb a mountain, which is to say none.

“Izzy and I have been trained to fight demons since we were very young. The reason you haven’t heard of anything like this before is because, usually, everyone involved is invisible to mundane people.”

Magnus scoffs. “Are you saying there is a whole bunch of invisible decapitated bodies lying around Manhattan?”

“Of course not,” Alec says reasonably. “If there are bodies left behind after a fight, we get rid of them.”

Magnus feels his stomach clench. He doesn’t want to know how many bodies they’re talking about. He pushes the thought aside and focuses on the case at hand.

“Then what happened with the Christmas turkey?”

Alec sighs. “That was my fault.”

Magnus widens his eyes with a glare that hopefully conveys the, “No shit, really?” going through his mind.

Alec grimaces. “Izzy killed it, but I was the one who got us into the fight.”

“Explain.”

“There hasn’t been a case of demonic possession out in the open since before I was born. Demons normally keep a low profile, but this one was barreling through people on the street like an all-you-can-eat, and it was heading straight for…” Alec clamps his mouth shut and collects his thoughts before he continues. “Anyway, I convinced Izzy that we had to stop it before it could get where it was trying to go.”

Magnus absorbs the information with as much aplomb as any guy being told a story about a demon possessing people in Midtown. It feels like he’s listening to Alec describe the plot of a summer blockbuster.

“We caught up with it in that alley off 39th after it jumped into the guy from your file. We fought. You know the rest.”

Magnus nods. He knows that police showed up at the scene. They picked up the body and two unidentified persons of interest.

“You said normally everyone involved is invisible. Does that include you and Isabelle?”

“Yes.”

“Then why weren’t you?”

Alec crosses his arms tighter and stares out of the window for a long moment.

“Remember how I said I couldn’t do magic?”

“Yeah?”

“I used to be able to, in a way. Izzy and I had tools we could use, kind of like magic pens.”

“Stele,” Magnus says, remembering his conversation with Alec in the subway tunnels. “Is that what you meant?” 

“You remember that?”

“Remembering small details helps me do my job.” Magnus brushes the terminology aside to get to the point. “So, the stele allowed you to make yourselves invisible. You also used to have access to other magical weapons. Why don’t you anymore?”

Alec goes full on pack mule for a long moment before he gets his teeth open just far enough to spit out a few words.

“I got kicked out,” he says finally as if that explains everything. “Izzy decided to leave with me.”

Magnus blinks.

He wonders if there is some sort of magical home tree that magical demon killers need access to in order to power their magical pens. Then he wonders just when he lost his mind and jumped with both feet into fantasy-land.

It’s far easier to deal with mundane problems, so Magnus decides to focus his efforts there.

“Where are you staying now?”

Magnus is pretty sure he already knows the answer to that one.

“Wherever.” Alec shrugs.

Magnus grits his teeth and gets up from the couch, wiping his hands over his tired face. It’s going on midnight.

“You two can stay here for tonight,” he says, heading to his bedroom. “Izzy fits on the couch, you will have to make do with a blanket on the floor. Tomorrow morning, we can make a call to social services. They can help you kids figure something out.” 

Magnus has one foot over the threshold to the bedroom when a rough hand clamps down on his shoulder, spins him around, and pins him to the wall next to the door.

“For the last time, I’m not a child,” Alec snarls right in his face and presses his mouth firmly against Magnus’s lips.

The kiss is ninety percent petulant defiance and barely ten percent seduction. Magnus is about to bring up that fact when Alec shifts his hips and pushes him harder against the wall.

The hard evidence of one hundred percent desire grinding against the crease of his groin short-circuits Magnus’s brain, leaving him too stunned to do anything.

A barrage of loud impatient knocks rains down on the outside of his apartment door.

“Magnus? Alec?” Izzy’s voice is far too loud and chipper for this time of night. “I’m back, but I don’t have a key!”

Alec pulls away from him like he’s been burned. A bright red flush is flooding up from the crew-neck of his black T-shirt all the way to the dense black hairline at the top of his forehead.

Magnus straightens himself up and slips to the side, escaping from his trapped position against the wall.

“Remind me to talk to both of you _kids_ about consent,” he says sharply on his very short walk to open the door for Izzy.

Izzy breezes inside with a big smile and three large brown grocery bags.

“Ma Lee says hi. She also says you need to eat more eggs, whatever that means, and that she wants you to meet her niece shoe… show… I’m so sorry, I forgot her niece’s name. Ma Lee talks a lot and very fast.”

Izzy dumps the bags on the only square foot of counter space in his kitchenette and starts unpacking.

“Look who’s talking,” Magnus says with an amused grin.

“I wanted to tell you before I forgot!” Izzy says while she shoves eggs, and milk, and a bag of steam buns into his empty fridge.

Magnus watches in growing disbelief as she pulls out a box of cereal, a loaf of bread, a bag of rice.

“Did you buy the whole store?”

Izzy bites her bottom lip and looks down before she glances up at him from under long dark lashes in a strange mix of innocent and seductive that makes Magnus feel like he needs to hose her down with cold water and then take a long cold shower himself.

“I hoped we’d be here for a couple of days,” she mutters. “Is it too much?”

She’s not asking if the food’s too much. She’s asking if she and her brother are too much.

Magnus can feel her sad, brown puppy eyes go through his resolve like a power-drill going through butter.

“It’s fine.”

“Thank you!”

Just like that, he’s got the smaller Lightwood plastered against him. Her delicate arms are surprisingly strong, holding on to his neck with an iron grip as she plants a smacking kiss on his jaw and squeezes the stuffing out of him.

“We really need to talk about consent,” he rasps as he pulls on her arm so he can breathe.

He really needs to apologize to Raphael again when he sees him at work tomorrow, too.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always for the wonderful feedback and the many kudos. It makes me so silly happy that my stuff is well liked. Continue to enjoy and let me know what you think.
> 
> ###### 

“What do you mean, ‘what case’?”

Magnus stares incredulously at his partner.

Raphael is sitting behind his desk with a to-go cup of chamomile tea in his hand, looking at Magnus as if he’s the one who’s developed a sudden case of very specific memory failure.

“I mean exactly that,” Raphael says blandly, “We haven’t had a new case in over a week. It’s been eerily quiet, honestly.”

Magnus huffs out a disbelieving laugh. He doesn’t know why Raphael is trying to prank him. He seems to like the chamomile tea – better than the chai at any rate – and just last night they were both on the same page or at the very least reading the same chapter.

“Okay, if you’re done messing with me, can we talk about the case, please?”

Magnus left the two Lightwoods asleep in his living room less than an hour ago, and he really needs to figure out a solution that doesn’t involve him getting fired and Alexander and Isabelle imprisoned for life.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Raphael’s tone is tip-toeing on that thin edge right before he starts using profanity and outlandish threats.

Magnus pushes him aside and takes over his computer. It’s a move he knows will send Raphael over said edge, but he doesn’t care. He ignores the vulgar threats of physical violence with medieval implements. He’s busy going through Raphael’s emails, looking for the coroner’s report.

It’s not there.

He checks Raphael’s desk for the physical copy of it.

It’s gone.

He checks his own desk for his copy.

Not there.

He storms wordlessly across the room to Clary’s Lair.

“Biscuit?” he says very calmly.

She raises her messy red bun-head with a sunny smile.

“Yeah?”

“Remember those copies you helped Raphael with yesterday?”

“Which ones?”

“Coroner’s report. You made two copies and put them in manila folders with pretty little labels on the tabs.”

“Magnus,” she says sweetly. “That’s what I do for all of them. You’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“Picture on Page 1 of a headless white guy carved up like a Christmas turkey.”

Her button nose wrinkles with a noise of disgust. Then she shakes her head.

“Yeah, I’d remember seeing that. Bleh. No.”

“Biscuit,” Magnus says in disbelief and disappointment.

He expects this kind of prank from Raphael not from his favorite administrative aide on the planet.

“Magnus, what’s wrong?” she says with a look of concern. “You’re acting strange. Are you feeling okay?”

He pushes himself off her counter with a noise of frustration and heads to the printer. He hopes Clary didn’t remember to clear the buffer.

The printer is out of order, unplugged from the wall.

So much for that.

Magnus barrels down the stairs into the basement. He barely remembers to sign himself into the evidence locker – because there’s actually someone at the desk during the day – before he punches in the code and lets himself in.

The box with the evidence is gone.

Magnus has no doubt the copy of the intake form at the front desk, waiting to be added into the electronic file system, is also gone.

Someone erased every shred of physical evidence that there ever was a case and wiped the memories of everyone involved.

Except for him.

Alec and Izzy!

The thought hits Magnus like a bullet. He’s out of the evidence locker and up the stairs. His heart hammers in his chest, breath coming fast and hard. Out of the precinct and around the corner. He hurls himself behind the wheel of the homicide division’s unmarked car. He can’t remember the last time he’s had to use it.

The lightbar at the top of the windshield flares to life, the siren starts to howl, and he’s plowing his way through downtown Manhattan traffic at 9 am on a weekday, hoping he won’t be too late.

The door to his apartment is open.

For the first time in forever, Magnus removes his service weapon from its holster, releases the safety, and walks through a door with his gun drawn.

It takes less than a second for his gaze to jump across the living room and take in the four people and their relative positions. Alec, unarmed. Male hostile, armed. Izzy, armed. Female hostile, unarmed.

“NYPD. FREEZE.”

The gun is trained on the armed hostile engaged in a struggle with Alec on top of the broken coffee table. The hostile is holding a _sword_ that Alec is restraining with a firm grip clamped around the man’s wrist.

“Drop the weapon,” Magnus orders. “And slowly move away from the boy.”

“Magnus Bane?”

The shriek comes from the female hostile.

Magnus glances at her out of the corner of his eyes.

She’s standing with her wrists crossed in front of her chest at the business end of Izzy’s snake staff.

She’s white, slender, about five foot ten and 130 pounds, in her mid-forties. Red hair, blue eyes, slim, angular features.

Magnus has no idea who she is or why the woman knows his name, and he doesn’t care.

“Hands where I can see them and step away from the girl.”

“You don’t remember me,” the red-head drawls with a smile.

“Step away from the girl,” he repeats louder.

The gun and most of Magnus’s attention is still on the guy with the sword.

The guy drops it. No, it disappears into a dull metal tube.

“I said drop it!”

The guy drops the tube and pulls himself onto his feet, away from Alec.

African-American, mid-twenties, 160 pounds, just under six feet. Black hair, brown eyes, wide, round features.

Magnus catches a glimpse of a dark tattoo. An abstract symbol. Hard to memorize, but a sense of familiarity prickles at the back of his mind.

The male hostile stares at Magnus more than he stares at the gun trained on his chest.

“That’s Bane?”

“You’re under arrest.”

The red-head laughs like Magnus told a funny joke.

“Maybe next time,” she says and claps her hands together before she thrusts them forward.

Magnus almost slips his finger around to squeeze the trigger, but then a bright, swirling portal opens between him and the hostiles.

When the portal disappears, they are gone.

Magnus lowers his weapon with a sigh of relief, engages the safety, and stuffs the gun back into its holster.

Izzy and Alec are still there. They look unharmed. He can’t help but make sure.

“Are you two all right?”

“Yeah.” Izzy turns her staff back into a whip and coils it around her wrist where it turns back into a bracelet. “Thanks, Magnus.”

He nods distractedly, offering his arm to help Alec off the floor.

Alec ignores his hand to pick up the tube beside him and pulls himself to his feet with more than one suppressed wince of pain.

“I’m fine.”

When he turns to check on Izzy, Magnus can see Alec’s back is covered in wood splinters from the broken coffee table. There are shards of glass, too.

“You’re not.”

He reaches out again and gets his hand slapped for his trouble. Alec looks furious.

“How did they know where to find us?”

“I don’t know,” Magnus says honestly, shaking his head. “I don’t think they were looking for you. I think they came here for me.”

“Why do they know who you are?” Alec sounds suspicious.

“I don’t know,” Magnus says again. “They must have come from the precinct. Someone erased everyone’s memory and took all the evidence from your case. Who are these people?”

Alec makes a face and clamps his mouth shut.

Izzy glares at him and crosses her arms over her chest.

“Shadowhunters,” she says defiantly. “The guy was, anyway. The woman was definitely a warlock.”

Magnus blinks. The term ‘warlock’ has a similar effect to the word ‘magic’. Except it’s a hell of a lot more uncomfortable and also works when other people say it.

“Don’t you mean witch?” he asks.

There’s nothing happening with that word.

“No, it’s warlock. They’re the children of demons and humans, born with innate magical power.”

“Yeah, I don’t care.”

It’s a knee-jerk reaction that goes down to the bone. Everything in him rejects the subject.

“Why would these Shadowhunters want to hurt you?”

“Because we broke the law,” Alec says roughly, pulling a glass shard the size of a quarter out of his shoulder.

“Okay,” Magnus says, turning away from the sight. “I can’t watch this.”

His fingers twitch with the need to do _something_ to remove the splinters and treat the cuts, but there’s no way Alec would accept help, so he just has to get it out of his face.

“If you’re going to be a masochistic ass, at least do it in the bathroom where I don’t have to see it.”

Alec shoots him a glare like he’s the bad guy before he storms past him.

Magnus sneers after his shredded retreating back.

“And for heaven’s sake use disinfectant, you stubborn mule. It’s under the sink.” 

The bathroom door slams shut.

Izzy snickers and drops into the armchair, slim legs flying up in the air before they come down across the armrest.

“You really like my brother, don’t you?”

“He’s a pain in my …” Magnus thinks better of finishing that sentence. “Never mind. Are you sure you’re okay?”

Izzy nods. “So, they really erased everyone’s memories at the station?”

“Yeah.” Magnus sinks into the couch with a heavy sigh. “They removed the physical evidence and the files too.”

“Sounds like standard clean-up procedure.” Izzy nods sagely.

Magnus shakes his head. “What kind of organization am I dealing with here?”

Izzy shrugs. “Shadowhunters have been protecting the Downworld and hiding it from mundanes for generations. Like, a thousand years worth of generations.”

Magnus makes a faint noise in his throat.

“And you two were part of that?” he asks.

Izzy nods. “Til they kicked us out.”

Magnus bites his lip. It’s the perfect opportunity to fish for more information.

“Not the way your brother tells the story.”

Isabelle narrows her eyes. “That’s because my brother wouldn’t tell you the story.”

Magnus drops his head with a smirk. He feels a self-defeating sense of pride that she’s too smart to fall for that hook.

“Are you going to tell me?” he asks sincerely.

She shrugs. “It’s not mine to tell. My story is simple. Anybody who doesn’t want my brother doesn’t get to have me either.”

Magnus is pretty sure that with ‘anybody’ she’s predominantly referring to her parents.

“Makes sense.” He gets up with a sigh. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

“No,” she says. “I wanted to make pancakes but they showed up.” She twiddles her fingers over her belly. “Also, I don’t really know how to make pancakes from scratch.”

Magnus rolls his eyes. “Get the eggs and milk out of the fridge. I think I still have some flour somewhere.”

He steps into the kitchenette and starts poking through the handful of cabinets.

“If not,” Izzy offers as she opens the fridge, “I can run down to Ma Lee real quick and get some.”

Magnus pauses with his hand on a large mixing bowl inside the cabinet. He turns his head to look at the back half of the seventeen-year-old girl sticking out of his refrigerator.

The bathroom door flies open.

“Magnus,” Alec barks across the room, “Which one do I use? Alcohol or hydrogen peroxide?”

What has he gotten himself into?

He gets back to the precinct around eleven in the morning, trying not to look like someone who just made pancakes for fugitives and cleaned up their living room after a brutal home invasion.

Then again, Alec and Izzy are no longer fugitives from mundane law, because their case never happened as far as everyone else at the station is concerned.

Magnus goes back and forth about trying to convince Raphael of the truth.

They get another case. It’s a regular one. The perpetrator shot the victim in the victim’s home over a drug deal gone sour and was arrested still at the crime scene, high on drugs, trying to flush the drugs and the gun down the toilet. Stupid stuff. 

At the end of the day, Magnus still hasn’t told Raphael, and he’s not sure he will.

“You want to head over to McKinney’s?” Raphael offers as he puts on his coat.

“No, not tonight,” Magnus says. “I’ve got …” Two felons waiting for dinner in my apartment. “A thing.”

Raphael looks at him with a deadpan stare.

“I dare you to be less specific.”

Magnus writhes under the look and shrugs.

“It’s just someone I have to meet.”

Raphael’s eyebrows go up from their neutral position.

“Like a date?” There is the flash of a smile before he raises his hand. “You know what? Don’t tell me. Just have fun and be safe.”

“It’s not a date,” Magnus says with a disgruntled sniff.

The way his life is going, he won’t be dating anytime soon. Which is fine with him. He’s not setting out to get his heart broken again. Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt with the NYPD logo.

“Uh-huh.” Raphael turns off his computer and heads out the door. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see you.”

When Magnus gets back to his apartment, the lights are off. The living room and kitchenette are clean. The window is closed.

Magnus’s heart thumps against his ribcage.

He checks the bathroom and the bedroom.

Alec and Izzy are gone.

Magnus sits down on the couch and forces himself to stop and think. There are no signs of a struggle. The door was closed and locked when he arrived, just like he’d left it when Alec and Izzy were here, on the same couch, munching on pancakes and experiencing daytime-TV for what looked like the first time.

There would have been a struggle if someone had tried to take them against their will.

They’re just gone because they left him.

Magnus stares at the empty space between the couch and the TV where the coffee table used to be. He doesn’t know how long he just sits there, but it’s pretty dark the next time he gets up.

He opens the fridge and stares at all the food that he’s never going to eat by himself before it spoils. There’s almost a whole gallon of milk on the bottom shelf and it’s from a cow. He closes the fridge.

Someone rattles on the outside of his window.

Magnus storms over, ready to pull his gun and shoot whoever is stupid enough to try him at this very moment.

That’s when he recognizes the shock of black hair, the serious dark brows, and the stubborn jaw on the other side of the glass.

Magnus pushes the window up, grabs two fistfuls of shirt and forcefully hauls the stubborn ass into his living room. Doesn’t even look at him before he leans back out the window, grabs his gluttonous little sister, and yanks her in, too.

With one Lightwood wrist in each hand, things just kind of explode out of him.

“Where the hell were you two?” He looks from Alec to Izzy and back again, trying to figure out which of the two is to blame for their reckless, cruel stupidity. “I thought you were dead. I thought you’d been kidnapped! I thought you had just up and left me!”

His eyes flash with sudden rage so much that his vision goes funky, because for a second he swears the two idiots are glowing around the edges, but it doesn’t matter because he’s not finished chewing them out.

“No warning. No note. Not even a ‘So long and thanks for all the fish’! Do you have any idea what I’ve been through all day? Trying to figure out how to deal with a homicide case that all of my co-workers think never happened. Trying to figure out how to protect you from Shadowhunters and warlocks, and actual law enforcement. Lying to my partner!”

“I’m sorry, Magnus,” Izzy apologizes, hanging her head in shame. “We didn’t think about leaving a note.”

“Um, Magnus.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Alec shakes his head. “It’s just—"

“I swear if the next words out of your mouth aren’t ‘I’m sorry’, I’m going to—"

“What?” Alec asks sharply, glowering at him.

Magnus feels the arm in his grip go tense and watches Alec draw himself tight like he’s preparing for a physical blow. He chokes down a noise of frustration and releases Alec’s arm.

“Yell at you until I run out of rage, that’s what.”

He’s not even yelling anymore. Apparently, he ran out of rage faster than he thought he would.

They’re here. They’re safe. It’s okay.

He lets go of Izzy’s wrist, too, and steps away from them to close the window.

“Where were you?”

His hands are still a bit unsteady. At least his vision is back to normal. No more glowing edges.

“Patrol,” Alec says matter-of-factly.

“Oh, that’s great.” Magnus whirls around with an exasperated grimace, waving his hand toward the room at large. “Does that mean I can expect another mutilated body to appear and disappear from my caseload tomorrow?”

“See,” Izzy says, pointing at Magnus while her glare is on Alec. “I told you he wouldn’t like it.”

Why is he not surprised this was Alec’s idea?

“He’s not our boss,” Alec says and adds with a very pointed look at Magnus, “or our parent.”

“No.” Magnus is well aware that Alec sees him as anything but a parental figure. “But I am a police detective, and what you’re doing is vigilantism, and it’s against the law. Ever heard of it?”

Alec sniffs. “Mundane law.”

“Don’t give me that crap.” Magnus feels the fumes of his rage reignite. “You’re lucky you got away with murder once. Do you really have to push it?”

“We were patrolling for demons, not people.”

“The last demon you killed was a person!”

That snaps Alec out of it. His face closes off and he lowers his head, broad shoulders sagging as he stares at the floor.

It’s the sob from behind Magnus that hits him like a baseball bat to the back.

“I didn’t mean to.” Izzy’s voice is so small, it’s barely audible.

“Shit.” Magnus is facing the other way and down on his knees next to Izzy. “I’m so sorry, kitten.”

She’s curled on the floor in front of the couch, knees drawn up to her chest with her face buried in her arms on top of them. There’s no sound coming from her, but he can tell she’s crying by the way her body trembles.

Magnus cringes and puts an arm around her shoulders.

She curls into him and grabs his delicate silk shirt almost hard enough to tear it.

“I really didn’t mean to,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says and knows it’s true. “I believe you.”

He rubs her shoulder and looks up at Alec who is standing in front of them like he doesn’t know where to go or what to do with himself.

Magnus scoffs. “Can I send you out for some fried chicken or are you going to run off to go on patrol?”

Alec’s expression slams shut.

“I don’t have any money.”

Magnus rolls his eyes and pulls his wallet from his back pocket.

“My keys are on the tray by the door.”

Alec takes the wallet like he’s doing Magnus a favor and leaves in a huff. At least he doesn’t slam the front door on his way out. Baby steps and all that.

The boy takes way too long to pick up fried chicken from a neighborhood that is loaded with food places. By the time the door lock clicks open, Izzy is curled up in Magnus’s bed. She cried herself to sleep against his shoulder. He tucked her into his comforter and closed the bedroom door behind him.

There’s no need to wake her up while Magnus is quietly yelling at her infuriating brother some more.

“Where the hell did you go to buy chicken? Pennsylvania?”

“I lost track of time.”

“You went on patrol.”

Alec averts his gaze with a clenched jaw.

“Where’s Izzy?”

“Sleeping.”

Alec looks at the empty couch. Then he looks at the closed bedroom door. Then he looks at Magnus with a fiery glare of accusation.

Magnus makes a noise that’s outrage and disbelief strangling each other in his throat. He doesn’t deserve that look. He has no idea where Alec gets the idea that he deserves that look.

“I tucked her in after she cried herself to sleep,” he hisses quietly, “because her older brother is a stubborn, reckless ass.” 

Alec flinches as if he’s been slapped. The plastic bag in his hand crinkles. His grip on it is tight.

Magnus relents with a groan.

“Did you get that after patrol,” he asks, pointing at the bag smelling like greasy fried chicken, “or do we have to put it back in the oven?”

Alec ducks his head. “It could probably use heating up.”

Magnus sniffs and takes the bag from him. He wants to call him an ass again, but twice in one day is enough.

They set aside a few pieces for Izzy, and re-heat the rest of the chicken for dinner. Neither of them says anything while they sit down in front of the TV with plates on their laps and a roll of paper towels between them.

Magnus opens the streaming app and picks a cop show. He likes laughing at the parts they get wrong.

He almost misses it when Alec says something, because the cop on TV is hamming it up in the interrogation room.

“I wasn’t on patrol.”

Magnus glances over at him.

The cop show prattles on. Alec’s staring blankly at the screen.

Magnus is willing to bet Alec couldn’t tell you what is happening in the scene. He puts his plate on the floor, turns around to face Alec, and braces his elbow on the backrest, propping his head against the heel of his hand.

“Then where were you?”

Alec keeps staring at the screen. The chicken on his plate is nothing but a pile of bones. Alec’s still picking at it.

“Just walking,” he says. “Thinking.”

Magnus can feel the word “moping” jump to the tip of his tongue. He swallows it down and waits.

Alec gets up and takes both of their plates to the kitchenette. He dumps the chicken bones in the trash and starts doing the dishes.

Magnus muffles a groan of frustration against his forearm.

“Like pulling nails.”

He gets up from the couch, joins Alec at the sink, and grabs the dishtowel.

“Thinking about what?”

Magnus places his bet on the teenage trifecta: nothing, dunno, whatever.

“The demon,” Alec says instead. “Where it came from. Why it was heading for the Institute. Why it tried to jump into me.”

Magnus jerks. “It tried to jump into you?”

“Almost did.” Alec says, handing him a wet plate.

Magnus nearly drops it before he gets a good grip.

“That’s why Izzy beheaded him?”

Alec nods. “She had a split second. It was him or me.”

Magnus understands that premise all too well. He wants to ask Alec if he thinks she’s going to be okay. Then it hits him that he’s the adult, and Alec should probably be asking him that.

“She’s tough,” Alec says with a smile. “Tougher than me. She just needs time.”

He turns sideways, leans his hip against the counter, crosses his arms, and looks at Magnus. Standing tall with his shoulders squared, serious expression, furrowed hero brow, and stubborn jawline. Jaded beyond his years.

“I really appreciate what you’re doing for her, Magnus.” He pauses, swallows, looks down. “For both of us.” 

Magnus doesn’t know what to say. A simple “you’re welcome” feels strangely inappropriate. The unexpected impulse to kiss Alec is definitely inappropriate.

He nods jerkily and takes a step back. His wits are scattered like so many pieces of a broken plate.

“I’m just gonna go check on her,” he says and stumbles toward the bedroom.

He opens the door a crack and pokes his head inside.

“Kitten?” he says softly.

Izzy makes a grumpy noise and rolls over. Her arms are squeezing one of Magnus’s pillows tightly to her chest.

“Alec,” she mumbles sleepily.

“He’s right out here. You hungry, or do you want me to let you sleep?”

She utters a string of sounds that doesn’t have any real words in it and cuddles the pillow closer to her chest.

Magnus takes that to mean she just wants to sleep. He retreats quietly and closes the door. Then he takes a deep breath and puts a smile on his face. He can certainly pretend he’s not bothered by the situation he’s put himself in.

“Looks like I’m sleeping on the couch tonight,” he announces in a chipper tone.

His back is going to kill him tomorrow morning if his inappropriate urges toward Alec don’t get to him first.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, 
> 
> thanks again for all the continued love. This chapter is the one that earns the M rating. I think I was vague enough to stay under the E. 
> 
> Enjoy and let me know what you think
> 
> ###### 

After a long night of very little, very uncomfortable sleep, Magnus is in a mental state of “Don’t Dead – Open Inside” by the time he falls off the couch onto his feet and stumbles into the bathroom.

The sink is occupied. By Alec. Tall, gorgeous, naked except for a towel around his hips. Shaving.

Magnus stumbles backward out of the bathroom with a noise somewhere between “not fair” and “fuck me”.

He can’t even. Or odd. He needs coffee.

He tries to forget the visual. It has lodged itself in his brain with the same infuriating obstinacy as the man it belongs to.

Aside from the large Z-shaped mark on Alec’s neck, the scars of at least a dozen other abstract symbols litter his arms and back, faded but distinct like the results of a painfully botched tattoo removal.

When Alec comes out of the bathroom, he’s wearing his same black jeans and one of the few plain T-shirts Magnus owns. It fits like he’s auditioning for an underwear ad.

Magnus turns his gaze resolutely to the inside of his coffee mug.

“There’s a lock on the bathroom door,” he says coolly. “It works by flipping it vertical.”

Alec snorts. “There’s this thing called knocking. It works even when the door’s not locked.”

“Don’t, please,” Magnus moans.

His heart can’t take it this morning. His brain’s not up to the task of standing guard.

“Is there any coffee left?”

Alec walks closer, closer, too close. Magnus can smell his own damn body wash on Alec and it definitely doesn’t have that effect when he uses it on himself.

“Help yourself. I gotta get ready for work.”

Magnus puts down his mug, bolts into the bathroom, and takes a very quick, very cold shower.

It doesn’t help.

“Sorry, kitten,” he mumbles to a still sleeping Izzy as he sneaks around the bedroom in his robe to grab clothes.

He zips back into the bathroom to get dressed and leaves for work ridiculously early.

“I’ll be back around seven. If you go out, leave a note.”

He closes the door as quickly as he can and hightails it to the precinct.

Raphael gives him a strange look when he gets to work. Probably because Magnus was so busy fleeing from home that he forgot to make his usual stop at the coffee shop.

They’re still working on wrapping up the paperwork for the drug deal murder. Magnus uses the opportunity to run the names Alexander Lightwood and Isabelle Lightwood through every database he has access to. All of them come up blank.

He wants to search for the man and woman who broke into his apartment, but he doesn’t have a good excuse or enough time to start flipping through mug books. He also has a feeling he won’t find them in there. Magnus still swears he’s seen the abstract tattoos on the guy before, and not just because he saw the matching scars on Izzy and Alec, but he can’t figure out where or when.

The day drags on. Magnus keeps looking over his shoulder, expecting a surprise visit from these so called Shadowhunters. He’s a loose end. Radical organizations with discernible tattoos don’t usually leave those hanging around.

A hand slams down on the desk butting up against his own.

“Okay, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Magnus flinches and peeks around his screen to look at Raphael.

“Is the operating system giving you trouble again?”

“No, it’s you.” Raphael’s expression is grim. His eyes are hard.

Magnus blinks. “What did I do?”

“You’ve been acting twitchy.”

“I’m not twitchy.” Magnus flinches at the defensive tone in his voice.

“There,” Raphael says, pointing at him. “Twitchy. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

At any rate, it’s nothing that Magnus can explain without dragging Raphael into something that’s probably going to get him killed.

“No. It’s something.” Raphael shakes his head, furrows his brows, and clenches his jaw in a way that makes it clear he’s not far from threatening violence. “If you don’t want to talk about it here, you can tell me at McKinney’s.”

“I can’t,” Magnus says reflexively. “I still have that thing.”

“That’s it!” Raphael’s palm slams down on the table again. “You’re going to tell me about that _thing_ , because whatever it is, it’s got you twitchy, and lying about it, and avoiding me, so you and I are going to McKinney’s tonight.”

“Or what?” Magnus snaps.

The answer involves an incredibly detailed threat of an outlandish act of violence that is as infeasible as it is gory.

“That’s a new one,” says Magnus, “but I really have to get home after work.” He sighs. “I know I’ve been acting weird today, but it’s nothing you have to worry about. It’ll be fine.”

When Magnus gets home, the kitchenette looks like a food-fight has come and gone. Alec is nowhere to be seen. Izzy is sitting on the couch with a guilty expression, facing an aged wooden coffee table stacked with a bunch of dishes that look unappetizing at best, inedible at worst.

“I tried to make dinner to say thanks for letting me sleep in your bed,” she explains. “I think I failed.”

“Oh, kitten.”

What else can he say? He’s not sticking any of that in his mouth.

Izzy has turned her enormous, devastatingly effective puppy eyes on him.

“Do you want to try some or should I just throw it all in the trash?”

“The grilled bell pepper doesn’t look too bad.”

“They were tomatoes.”

Magnus tries not to, but the laughter bubbles up and pushes through from behind his lips.

“Sorry,” he says, ruffling her hair. “Maybe I can teach you.”

Her eyes are still big and now full of hope. “Would you?”

“Of course,” he says, picking up the dishes. “I don’t want you to accidentally poison us with your cooking.”

He starts to clean up by dumping the inedible food in the trash.

Izzy comes over with the rest of the dishes and helps.

“Do you like the new coffee table?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Where did you get it?”

“The guy next door moved out today. His friends didn’t show, so I helped him carry his stuff down.”

Magnus can vividly imagine how that went.

“Did you let him keep the illusion that he’s physically stronger than you?”

Izzy bites her lower lip. “Was I supposed to?”

Magnus thinks about it for a second before he crinkles his nose and shakes his head.

“Nah.”

By the time the place is clean, Alec is still not back. Magnus doesn’t have to ask where he went.

“Do you think your brother will stay out on patrol all night?”

Izzy shrugs and averts her gaze. Something about the question makes her uncomfortable.

“He was tense this morning. He’s probably working off some steam.”

Magnus scoffs. “And he can’t just get a gym membership like a normal person?”

Izzy blinks. Then she snickers. “No, actually. He can’t.”

“There are still better ways to relieve tension than going out to hunt demons.”

“My brother’s not the type for casual sex.”

“Isabelle!”

He does not want to know why she talks about casual sex as if she has engaged in it herself.

“Sorry,” she says, ducking her head. “TMI?”

“You’re seventeen,” he says with a sigh. “Can you at least leave me the illusion that you have some shred of innocence left?”

“Um.” Izzy sucks in her bottom lip with a frown before she shrugs and looks up. “When you’re like us, life goes faster. A lot of us don’t make it to twenty-one.”

The blunt words make Magnus’s stomach clench. He wants to drag Alec back from wherever the hell he is right now and lock him in the bedroom until he’s at least thirty. Izzy, too, for that matter. He wants to literally create a barrier around the whole building that repels any threat and keeps the three of them safe inside. That last thought is so strong, it washes like a tidal wave over his whole body.

“Don’t tell me that,” he says too late.

Izzy smiles. “You really like my brother.”

This time it’s not a question, and Magnus isn’t sure he has it in him to come up with a credible denial.

Izzy’s smile only gets bigger. “You should tell him.”

It’s late when Alec gets back. This time, Magnus lets him climb through the window on his own. He’s too worn out to exert himself by yelling or dragging around 170 pounds of obstinate male.

Izzy is sleeping in the bedroom again, because she was tired and Magnus wasn’t done waiting up for Alec. He has a bone to pick and he will pick it. Quietly.

“You can’t keep doing this,” he says calmly from his seat on the couch. “Not if you want to stay here.”

Who is he kidding? Magnus has no leverage, but he needs to make a point. If Alec wants to walk out, he hopes he can at least convince Izzy to stay for her own safety.

Alec doesn’t respond.

Magnus grits his teeth.

“Did you hear me?”

His answer is the sound of a cabinet door opening and banging shut. The faucet in the sink turns on full blast, water filling a glass. It turns off with the dull thump of a fist slamming down on the lever.

Great, that’s how they’re going to play it then.

Magnus gets up and walks over to the kitchenette. He crosses his arms in front of his chest and glares at Alec who is standing in front of the sink, drinking from his glass. Magnus raises his chin.

“The silent treatment is a little immature, don’t you think?” he rumbles flippantly.

Alec sets the glass down on the counter. He turns to face Magnus. He looks pissed. There is a gash in the T-shirt he borrowed. Several in fact. There’s some kind of oily black goop smeared on the fabric.

All intentions of staying quiet fly out the window.

Magnus sucks in a breath, ready to lay into Alec about how reckless, and stupid, and cruel it is to do this to him. To Izzy. To both of them.

He never gets that far.

Large, warm hands grab the sides of his face and Alec’s tongue slips into his open mouth. Between the two of them, it’s defiance, and anger, and fear, and desire, and a dozen other things muddled into a clumsy wet kiss.

“You’re not my parent,” Alec breathes the words hot against his lips.

Magnus tightens his grip on the unruly mop of black hair between his fingers – when did that happen? – and licks his lips.

“And you’re not a child,” he rasps, “so stop acting like one.”

“Fine.”

Alec pulls the ruined T-shirt up and over his head. Magnus’s hands are back on him before Alec has the chance to lower his arms. He doesn’t bother to pretend he’s not checking for injuries. 

His fingers slide over the healing scabs from the coffee table incident on Alec’s back, looking for any new injuries that are bleeding or in need of stitches. His breath comes in shallow gasps, eyes and hands fluttering from Alec’s chest, to his arms, to his stomach, to his hips. Nothing bleeding, nothing broken.

Relief makes him a little lightheaded even before Alec’s hand is back on his cheek, tilting his chin up, tongue in his mouth, stealing his breath.

The noise Magnus makes when their hips crash together is probably too loud, definitely too needy. He cuts it off with a gulp. Alec’s not the only one who is hard this time.

They’re making out against the kitchen sink, and the only thought Magnus can formulate clearly is that he’s not going into his bedroom for lube and condoms. Not for anything in the world. He knows if he does, Izzy will wake up, and things are just going to get awkward.

More awkward than crashing onto the padded kitchen mat in a tangled heap that’s all limbs and no grace.

“Sshh,” he whispers against Alec’s mouth, failing miserably at not laughing.

“You shush,” Alec grumbles. “I wasn’t the one who pulled us down.”

The snicker turns into a moan when Alec breathes heavily on a particularly sensitive spot against the side of his neck. Magnus tightens his arm around Alec’s shoulders while the fingers on his left hand clutch a fistful of the messy hair on his stubborn head.

He doesn’t have the first clue how far Alec is willing to go, but Magnus is ready to let him have whatever he wants. As long as it doesn’t involve a trip to the bedroom.

He lets go of Alec’s shoulders and squeezes one hand between them, scrabbling blindly at the button and zipper on Alec’s jeans. He gets them open, pulls his arm back, licks a broad swipe across his palm, and shoves his hand down Alec’s pants.

The noise Alec makes against his throat sets Magnus off again, teeth clamping down on his bottom lip to stifle a giggle and a moan at the same time. Alec humps into his grip, rubbing one strong thigh against just the right spot in just the right way.

God, anything for you, darling. Just please.

Alec’s hands are everywhere except where Magnus really, really wants them right now. He can’t blame him. If their positions were reversed, he probably wouldn’t have any kind of control, either.

He’s pretty sure he’s grinning like a lunatic when Alec pulls back and looks at him like he’s a saint, or maybe even a full-fledged angel.

Alec’s mouth hangs open and his eyes are half closed. His skin is flushed, color riding high on his cheekbones even in the sparse orange light coming from the lamp on the bottom of the microwave. He looks delicious, and Magnus is going to eat him alive. Later.

He pulls his hand away just long enough to lick another stripe down the center of his palm before it goes right back to the job.

Alec kisses him sloppily, and Magnus gets it. He wouldn’t do any better if it was him. He just wants. More. Now. Please. Thanks.

“Magnus.”

His name in that voice sends a liquid-hot shiver down his spine. He swipes his thumb over the same spot just to hear it again.

Alec comes with a broken whimpering noise huffed against the sensitive spot on Magnus’s neck. His hands are clamped around Magnus’s shoulders, holding on like he’s drowning. It’s hysterically funny and insanely hot.

When he rears up to kiss Magnus like he’s starving, it’s just insanely hot.

Alec’s breath ghosts over the shell of his ear. His voice is rough, and low, and devastatingly sexy.

“Tell me how to…”

Magnus bangs his head against the kitchen mat and makes a desperate, helpless noise in his throat. Like he’s got the wherewithal to give instructions right now.

“Just touch me. It won’t take much.”

He means it.

Alec’s fingers fumble at his belt. Magnus barely manages to help him get the damn thing unbuckled. He’s so damn ready, he can taste it behind his teeth. When Alec finally pulls down the zipper and reaches inside with warm calloused fingers, Magnus’s eyes roll closed with a groan.

The grip is too soft, too hesitant. Magnus wraps his hand around Alec’s and squeezes his fingers, showing him how.

It really doesn’t take much.

His eyes rip open.

Alec is gorgeous, glowing, perfectly angelic gazing down at him as Magnus flies apart into a million broken pieces.

They’re on the kitchen floor. It’s semi-uncomfortable. Magnus is cold, and sticky, and totally exhausted. It occurs to him that they’re going to have to get up to take care of the mess.

“Oh, god.” For a second he considers begging Alec to carry him to the couch. “I don’t think I can move.”

Alec chortles against his shoulder.

“Not funny,” Magnus says quietly. “What if your sister finds us like this?”

The chortling stops abruptly.

“Uh-huh.” Magnus groans. “I really don’t think I can move, though.”

Alec rolls his eyes at him. “You’re not that old.”

“No, but you’re heavy.”

Alec moves to get up, but Magnus keeps a firm grip on his elbow.

“Not just yet.”

Breakfast the next morning is interesting. Nobody has said anything, but they can’t seem to control their facial expressions, either.

Izzy’s perched with both feet up on the armchair, knees drawn to her chest. Another one of Magnus’s T-shirts is stretched over them down to her ankles. Her long hair isn’t brushed, spreading in a bushy dark mess around her face and shoulders. She hasn’t stopped grinning over the coffee mug in her hands. Her eyes keep darting back and forth between Alec and Magnus. Like a human Cheshire cat.

Alec is sitting on one end of the couch, his high cheekbones a subtle shade of pink, avoiding direct eye contact with his sister while stealing subtle glances at Magnus every so often. He’s wearing Magnus’s NYPD shirt and a pair of Magnus’s sweatpants. One big hand is clamped around his coffee mug, the other one is shoved under his thigh like he doesn’t trust himself to let it roam.

Magnus is a heap of aching bones stuffed inside a sweater and jeans on the other end of the couch, trying to figure out if he’s going to laugh or cry or both. He keeps his eyes on his coffee for the most part, waiting to see who’ll crack first. It’s not going to be him. Alec already broke him last night. Heh.

“So.” Izzy drags out the single vowel in a deadpan tone.

Magnus bites down on the inside of his cheeks. He’s not surprised it’s her. He looks up at Izzy and gets ready to deflect any questions or comments that are too intrusive.

She’s biting her lip but not even trying to fight the grin.

“Does that mean we get to stay?”

Magnus can’t stop smiling. He knows that’s a sign he’s lost his mind, but he can’t stop smiling anyway. He takes a few minutes longer at his favorite coffee shop and puts together an extra-large carton of pastries. Adds an order of a dozen bagels and three types of cream cheese for the hell of it. Remembers to get a separate fresh apple turnover for Clary. Their usual coffee orders. Chamomile tea for Raphael.

He drops off the lion’s share of his purchase in the precinct lunchroom and gets as far as ten steps from Clary’s Lair when the smile freezes on his face.

A tall blond guy is leaning on Clary’s counter, flirting with her. There is a visible black tattoo on the back of his neck. It’s an abstract symbol resembling a stylized lower-case ‘z’.

White male, a little under six feet, 160 pounds. Black leather jacket, blue jeans, motorcycle boots.

Shadowhunter.

No sooner does the thought cross Magnus’s mind when the guy turns around and looks directly at him.

Magnus adds mid-twenties and heterochromia to the description.

The guy narrows his eyes and sets his feet like he expects Magnus to run or fight.

They’re standing in the middle of a police station, surrounded by peace officers.

Magnus takes a deep breath and steps up to Clary’s Lair.

“Good morning, biscuit,” he says casually, not taking his eyes off the Shadowhunter. “Brought you your favorite.” He puts the beverage carrier on the counter and hands the paper bag around her desk.

“You’re my favorite,” Clary says brightly, continuing their little ritual before she turns serious. “This is Jace. He was looking for you. Do you—“

“Thanks, biscuit,” Magnus says quickly before she can ask any questions. “Hi, Jace. Thanks for coming. Let’s go somewhere we can talk in private.”

They watch each other warily while Magnus leads him to the interrogation rooms. Behind the closed door of Interrogation Room 2, Magnus drops the act.

“I know what you are. What do you want?”

“The Clave has ordered me to bring you in.”

The Shadowhunter says it like that’s supposed to mean something to Magnus. It doesn’t. It makes little difference to Magnus what they call the head of their vigilante organization. He clenches his fists. The adrenaline feels like electricity sparking under his skin.

“You’re welcome to try.”

“I won’t,” Jace says bluntly.

Magnus blinks. He recovers quickly, schooling his face into a neutral mask.

“Then what do you want?”

“I want you to take me to Alec.”

Magnus’s mind starts to race. The Shadowhunters know where he lives. They know Alec and Izzy are staying with him. Why would this particular guy need Magnus to take him anywhere?

“Why?”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”

“Humor me.”

Jace twitches his brows with a facetious smile.

“You’ve had your wards up since last night and I don’t feel like getting fried.”

Magnus has no idea what he’s talking about, but he can work with it. It sounds like the guy thinks he literally has no access to Alec, unless Magnus allows it. Magnus is curious why he hasn’t brought up Izzy at all.

“What do you want from Alec?”

The cool façade slips like a cheap face mask and suddenly the guy in front of him looks awfully young. Magnus judged him to be in his mid-twenties before. Now he’s not sure the kid is past his teens. God damn Shadowhunters growing up too fast.

“I need to warn him,” Jace says urgently. “There’s a war brewing. Everyone’s on edge, and if Alec doesn’t get the hell out of town and keep his head down, the Clave is going to kill him. They’ve already taken him from me. I’ll be damned if I let them take his life.”

The words make Magnus feel sick to the stomach. There aren’t that many interpretations to play around with here. There is really only one when he takes in the expression on Jace’s face.

Izzy’s words echo in his head, mocking him.

Alec’s not the type for casual sex.

Magnus has a choice to make.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the halfway point. Here be where we really ramp things up. As always, thank you so much for your continued interest and all the wonderful feedback and kudos. They make my day :)
> 
> ###### 

Magnus is standing inside the open front entrance to his apartment building in Chinatown. Jace is hanging back, lingering at the bottom of the stone steps.

“What are you waiting for?” Magnus says.

“Um, wards?”

Jace points at the building as if there’s something to point at besides the cracked plaster and peeling paint.

Magnus exhales a frustrated sigh and stomps his foot. This is hard enough. Why does the boy have to make it harder by playing pretend that he can’t get into the building?

“There’s nothing there. I didn’t booby-trap the damn place. Can you just come in already?”

“You gotta be kidding.” Jace shakes his head and throws his hands up in a dramatic fashion. “You put up magical wards around the whole building. I literally can’t get in unless you change them to allow me through.”

Jace takes a step forward and raises one hand, fingers straight. He presses it flat against the air in front of him at the edge of the first step. The air shimmers and ripples and Jace’s hand starts to blister. He doesn’t even flinch. He just keeps his burning hand pressed against the invisible barrier for another moment before he pulls it back.

Magnus stares at the lingering evidence of volatile magic as Jace pulls a twisted black pen from his back pocket with his other hand. The tip of the pen lights up and flies over Jace’s skin, searing a dark, swirling symbol into his wrist. The burned skin heals in a matter of seconds. His hand is fine.

Magnus’s mind obnoxiously supplies the word stele.

“I…” He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what he’s done. He doesn’t know how to undo it, either. “How do I allow you in?”

“I don’t know!” Jace snaps waspishly, pocketing his stele. “I’m not a warlock. It usually involves a bunch of hand waving and intense staring.” He throws his hands around in a flurry of jerky motions to illustrate his point.

Magnus doesn’t remember doing anything like that. He doesn’t even remember raising the wards. Could he have done it in his sleep? How could he have done it? Is it even possible that he’s a …

His whole body physically twists away from the thought. His brows furrow and there is a nasty headache growing behind them, snaking toward his temples.

He just needs to allow Jace in. That’s all. Just let Jace walk past the door, up the four flights of stairs, and into the apartment. There’s nothing to it. Anyone can do it, really. Well, not anyone, obviously. But he’ll make an exception for Jace.

His eyes widen. What if the wards keep out normal people, too? Should he warn Raphael to stay away from his building until further notice? Has he accidentally burned one of his neighbors trying to come home or leave for work?

The questions get a surprisingly swift answer when the woman who lives on the third floor steps past him on the way out to walk her dog.

“Thanks for holding the door,” she says and breaks into a jog down the steps, moving past Jace as if he doesn’t exist.

Magnus breathes a sigh of relief.

“Okay.”

He furrows his brows again and tries to think hard of allowing Jace to get through the barrier unharmed. It feels like something inside him shifts, like he’s adjusting his jacket or tugging on his shirt sleeves.

“I think you’re good,” he says hesitantly.

“You sure?”

Jace slowly pushes his hand forward again. It moves and keeps moving past the spot where the air shimmered before. When he doesn’t get burned, Jace leaps up the front steps, pushes past Magnus through the entrance, and races up the staircase faster than a human being should be able to.

By the time Magnus catches up with him, the apartment door is wide open and Jace is already inside. Magnus almost doesn’t want to follow, afraid of what he’ll see.

It’s about what he expected.

Alec and Jace are not kissing, but they are standing in the space between the kitchenette and the couch, hugging each other fiercely. Their faces are buried in each other’s shoulder and Alec’s arms are wrapped around Jace’s back so tightly there’s no way the guy can breathe.

There’s no particular sensation when his heart breaks. Magnus just feels numb.

The two of them are talking to each other, still hugging, voices muffled against the other’s clothes. It’s like no one else in the whole universe even exists.

“It’s not what you think.”

The world returns to Magnus with the sensation of Izzy’s delicate fingers grasping his hand. She squeezes once and gives him an encouraging smile.

“They’re parabatai. Like brothers.”

Magnus has seen brothers hug before. That’s not what this looks like.

Izzy drags him off to the bedroom and Magnus lets her. She closes the door behind them and sits Magnus down on the edge of his own bed like he’s an injured person in shock. It’s not too far from the truth.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You look like you’ve been run over by a Drevak demon.”

“Bus,” Magnus says flatly. “The actual phrase is run over by a bus.”

“Okay,” she says, “but I don’t really care about metaphors right now.”

“Similes.”

“Whatever.”

She stoops to her knees in front of him and looks up with big, brown puppy eyes. She’s combed her hair and put on lipstick and eye-makeup. She must have found his.

“They’re not a couple,” she says quietly but firmly. “There is some, um, complicated history, and Alec’s gay, obviously, but he and Jace were never together. Jace is like ninety percent straight and the other ten percent is just because he’s unpredictable when he’s drunk.”

Magnus makes a pained noise as his stomach twists. It’s way too easy to make up stories when you’ve been a cop for a while. All it takes is one drunken night between a ninety percent straight guy and a hundred percent gay guy who doesn’t do casual sex.

He takes a shaky breath and reaches out to pat Izzy’s head.

“It’s sweet that you’re trying to make me feel better, kitten, but--”

“NYPD. FREEZE!”

Magnus does freeze. That’s Raphael’s voice bellowing from the front door.

“Step away from each other! Slowly! Keep your hands where I can see them!”

Raphael keeps his roar just below deafening, but it still carries clearly through the closed door into the bedroom.

“Raphael!” Magnus raises his voice to carry back to him. “It’s okay. I’m in here. There’s a girl with me. She’s not a threat.” He pulls himself to his feet and reaches out his hand to Izzy. “We’re coming out now. It’s okay.”

He steps out in front of Izzy, keeping his body between her and Raphael. He’s not too surprised to see a gun aimed at Alec and Jace. His hot-headed partner just walked through a wide-open door into Magnus’s apartment and found two strangers in the living room.

“It’s okay,” Magnus says again. “You can put the gun down.”

Raphael grimaces and shakes his head. “Not until you tell me what’s going on. Are you back?”

His gun wavers between Jace and Alec. His gaze flicks over to Magnus and then around him to Izzy.

“Who’s she?”

“That’s Izzy,” Magnus says calmly, keeping his body in front of her. “That’s Alec.” He points at Alec standing by the couch. “And that young gentleman is Jace.” He points at Jace who is closer to the window. “And what do you mean, am I back?” 

“Your wards are up,” Raphael says. “I don’t need to feel them to recognize when I’m passing through them.”

Magnus blinks. He doesn’t get the chance to ask before Raphael barrels on.

“First, I have to hear from Clary that you walked out of the precinct with ‘some strange tattooed guy’. Then I come here, your wards are up, the door’s wide-open, and there’s two goddamn Shadowhunters hugging it out in your living room. What the hell is going on?”

Magnus furrows his brows and tilts his head to the side. Yesterday, Raphael couldn’t remember anything about the case. He obviously still doesn’t recognize Izzy or Alec. How does he know anything about Shadowhunters and magic wards?

“I’d like an answer to that, too, actually.” He shakes his head. “But I’m not having this discussion at gunpoint. Put that thing away.”

“I’m not giving them the chance to draw their weapons.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Magnus rolls his eyes, losing his patience with the entire ridiculous situation. “Alec, put away that tube sword you stole from the other guy. Jace, would you kindly remove your stele and any other weapons you carry and put them on the coffee table? Izzy give me your bracelet.”

Izzy is the first to reach around and shove her bracelet into his hand. Then she keeps her arms around his belly in a loose hug, peeking over his shoulder at Raphael.

Alec and Jace take a minute longer.

“Move slowly!” Raphael barks at them, gun still aimed at Jace.

When he is satisfied that all the Shadowhunter weapons are out on the table, Raphael engages the safety and holsters his gun.

“Now, again, what the hell is going on?”

The living room feels cramped with five people in it. Especially because nobody is sitting down. Izzy’s still hanging on to Magnus in the doorway to the bedroom. Jace has moved right in front of the window, probably because Raphael is blocking the path to the front door. Alec has positioned himself between the coffee table and the bedroom, facing Raphael.

“You first,” Raphael barks and nods his chin at Alec. “What are you doing here, Shadowhunters?”

Alec smirks, keeping his hands low but open, ready for a fight.

“We met a few days ago. You just forgot.”

Raphael’s head jerks back like he’s been smacked in the forehead.

“Magnus?” he asks.

Magnus sighs. “Remember me asking you about that case and you didn’t know what I was talking about?”

Raphael nods slowly. “Go on.”

“Three days ago, we got a case. A guy was slashed up and beheaded. Strange murder weapon. Strange goop in his blood. This is going to be hard to believe, but the victim was possessed by a demon.”

Raphael’s gaze is hard on Alec. He doesn’t look surprised or disbelieving. He looks pissed and ready to re-draw his gun. His hands are on his hips.

“What kind of demon?”

Magnus laughs in disbelief. “You said you didn’t believe in literal demons!”

“I didn’t want to risk cracking the jiwa kupu-kupu.”

The Indonesian words ring strange in his ears. They feel like an animal scratching at the backdoor, demanding to be let in. Definitely not a butterfly, though.

“What are you talking about?” Magnus asks.

Raphael pulls back even further. “You didn’t actually lift it.”

“If I knew what it looks like, I could tell you if I moved it.”

Raphael huffs. “Never mind. Then what happened?”

Magnus narrows his eyes, but he humors his partner. For now.

“They brought in two persons of interest. Alec and Izzy. We interrogated them. They escaped custody through a magic portal.”

Magnus’s gaze shifts to Alec.

Alec’s eyes are too busy moving back and forth between Raphael and Jace to notice that Magnus is looking at him.

Magnus breathes through the clench of jealousy in his stomach and sums up the rest of the story in as few words as possible.

“Alec found me that night, convinced me to get his sister’s bracelet out of evidence lockup. When I returned to the precinct the next morning, Shadowhunters had come and gone. They took all remaining evidence of the case and wiped everyone’s memory except mine.”

“Bastards.” Raphael fumes. “I knew I was missing time.”

Magnus scoffs. “You had no idea. You thought I was crazy.”

“You were acting twitchy.”

“I had two felons hiding under my roof, and a secret organization broke into my home, trying to kidnap them.”

Raphael’s brows twitch as he tips his head to the side. “That explains it.”

Magnus rolls his eyes. “Thank you so much for your compassion and understanding.”

Raphael is unperturbed by the sarcasm.

“So, what are they still doing here?” he asks.

“That’s a really good question,” Jace pipes up from the window, glaring heatedly at Alec.

Raphael tips his head toward Jace. “And where does he come in?”

“I’m just here to warn Alec.” Jace tightens his grip on the window sill behind him. “You and Izzy should have left town weeks ago.”

“I’m not leaving when there’s a threat to the Institute,” Alec says coldly.

“They de-runed you!” Jace snaps. “They want to kill you.”

Magnus feels a twisted sense of joy that he’s not the only one suffering the pain of Alec’s obstinacy.

Alec crosses his arms over his chest and clenches his jaw, going into full pack mule mode.

“I’m not going anywhere until I figure out what’s happening and how to stop it.”

Jace crosses his arms just as stubbornly and sneers at Alec’s scowl.

“You can’t stop it. It’s too big.”

“No such thing.”

Magnus looks back and forth between the two young men, watching as they blank out everything around them, completely absorbed, unconsciously stepping closer to each other. He wants to throw up.

“The Clave are on edge,” Jace says coldly. “They’re executing anyone who sneezes at the wrong time. You performed an unauthorized kill and got arrested by mundanes. Take Izzy and get out of town before it’s too late.”

Alec brushes off the threat to his life with an infuriatingly casual wave of his hand.

“Just tell me, Jace.” 

“There’s a civil war brewing. Valentine--”

Jace has barely uttered the words when Raphael pulls his gun, releases the safety, and aims it at Jace’s face.

“Get out.”

Magnus has never seen his partner like this. He’s hot-headed, but he’s not the type to point a loaded weapon at an unarmed person. He’s not the type to stare unblinking at someone with his finger barely straight alongside the trigger.

“Raphael…”

“No.” Raphael barks, cutting him off. “Magnus, shut up.”

Raphael turns to point his gun at Alec and waves him over toward Jace. “You, too. Get out. Leave. All of you. Right now.”

Jace scoffs. He looks at the gun like it’s a toy and not a very deadly weapon capable of killing him in an instant.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

Stupid, stupid Shadowhunter. Raphael’s fuse is short at the best of times. Magnus tries to reason with him again.

“Raphael,” he says quietly, “please.”

He doesn’t recognize the man in front of him. It’s not his young, passionate partner who likes to curse creatively and gets way too wrapped up in soccer games on TV. It’s someone who has been around a long time, seen a lot more than he cared to, and is done putting up with any of it.

“I don’t give a shit what you do,” Raphael says tensely. “For all I care, you children of the Nephilim can take each other out in a blaze of glory. Make it count. Get rid of every last one of you. But stay the hell away from us.”

Both Jace and Alec look at Raphael like he’s grown a second head.

“You’re a mundane.”

“I was a Downworlder for a hell of a lot longer.” Raphael grins. It’s all teeth, no humor, and gone in an instant. “Now, leave before I shoot you.”

“Go,” Magnus says. “Run.”

It’s the only thing he can think to say because his partner didn’t use an outlandish, implausible threat. He used a very real one and now his finger is curled around the trigger.

Magnus feels Izzy’s arms let go of him.

Jace swings himself backward out the window onto the fire escape.

Alec only looks in Magnus’s direction long enough to make sure Izzy’s coming before he jumps out after his parabatai.

Izzy stumbles over the coffee table in her haste to get out without getting too close to Raphael and his gun. She still pauses with her hand on the window to look back at him.

“I know you don’t remember,” she says sincerely, “but I shouldn’t have kissed you like I did. It was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

She slips out the window while Raphael stares after her with his mouth hanging open.

Magnus knows they’re never coming back. He turns his eyes on his partner who slowly lowers his gun and re-engages the safety.

Magnus wants to yell at him. He wants to punch him in the face. He wants to shake him until he explains what the hell just happened.

“Happy now?” he asks bluntly.

“No,” Raphael says just as bluntly. “Not at all.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all again so much for your wonderful feedback and kudos. Some of you are on the spot with your theories and I love hearing them. Keep it coming.
> 
> ###### 

The living room feels too large with only the two of them. Magnus is coiled tight as a wire inside the armchair. There is still a pile of weapons on the coffee table. Izzy’s bracelet and Jace’s stele are not among them. Their absence explains Izzy's dramatic 'stumble' far better than any uncharacteristic bout of clumsiness.

Raphael walks out of the kitchenette with the bottle of good scotch from under the sink and two short rocks glasses. He fills both of them generously and puts one down on the coffee table in front of Magnus. Then he sits back on the couch and takes a large gulp from his own glass.

“I used to be a vampire.”

As far as outlandish statements go, this one is definitely one of Raphael’s finest.

“Made it all the way to clan leader, actually. For a hot minute.”

Magnus clamps his hand tightly around the glass and takes a sip.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you deserve an explanation for what I just did.” Raphael looks at him sincerely. “Because you no longer know me well enough to understand why without one.”

“Okay,” he says and doesn’t mean it. Nothing’s okay right now. “Talk.”

Raphael finishes his drink and refills his glass.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “Scotch tastes much better, but it’s nowhere near as potent as plasma used to be, and I can’t be sober for this conversation.”

He takes another gulp. His eyes turn glassy as his gaze drifts past Magnus.

“The Shadowhunters arrested me after Cam…” He presses his lips together before he continues, “After the New York Clan leader was killed. I was next in line, and they needed to punish someone for the illicit dens she had started all over the city.”

Magnus is beginning to understand why Raphael would feel animosity toward the organization. He still doesn’t understand why it would be bad enough to want to shoot three teenage Shadowhunters who posed no threat to him or Magnus.

“They locked me up. Tortured me with concentrated UV rays, holy water, angelic weapons, the works.” He finishes his second drink and refills the glass. “Then they moved me to an isolated block. Said I was going to be part of a special experiment. I was sure they were going to strap me to a cross and see how many body parts they need to burn off before I disintegrate.” He chuckles. “It was worse than that.”

Magnus feels his stomach turn more from the dispassionate tone in Raphael’s voice and the way he keeps downing glasses of scotch than from the words themselves.

“When I came back around, they had dumped me on a bench in the middle of Central Park.”

Raphael stares at nothing over Magnus’s left shoulder. His expression is slack, fingers curled loosely around the glass between his fingers.

“I could barely move. No vampire speed. No strength. Nothing but a flimsy set of scrubs on me. For the first time in seventy years, I sat and watched the sun come up.” A twisted smile curls up one corner of his mouth. “Imagine my surprise when I didn’t burn.”

Magnus frowns, shaking his head. He doesn’t understand. He gets what Raphael's saying, but it doesn't make any sense.

“They turned you human?”

Raphael nods. “The greatest possible gift with the worst possible timing.”

“What do you mean?”

Raphael sighs. “You suffered a few too many losses that week. I didn’t get back in time.”

There is a sudden sharp discomfort in Magnus’s chest. He takes a large sip from his glass, and another, and another until it’s empty. A shudder goes through him from the sudden rush of alcohol, but Raphael is already refilling his glass.

“Sorry,” Raphael says, “we’re probably getting too close to the edges of the spell.”

“What spell?”

“No.” Raphael shakes his head. “You’re not ready for that.”

“What are you, my dad?”

Raphael laughs. It sounds cracked and bleeding.

“Shut up,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Obviously,” Magnus says.

Someone must have put him under some sort of memory spell to make him forget. He wonders who and just the thought makes him physically twist away and change the subject.

“Still,” he insists, “I don’t believe for a second that Alec, Izzy, or even that Jace kid had anything to do with what happened to you.”

Raphael barks out another broken laugh.

“Of course not,” he says. “They’re just babies, eating up the lies their bigoted parents spoon-feed them from birth.”

Magnus realizes that he’s looking at a man carrying seven decades of resentment in his bones. 

“I’m not gonna go into details,” Raphael says firmly, “but what they’re dealing with is going to rip their world to shreds.” He smiles like he did before. Bared teeth and malice and gone in a flash. “And I don’t care, because this time, you and I won’t be a part of it. We’re going to go back to our boring mundie lives. Coffee and pastries, homicide cases, and stupid computers. That’s all.”

Raphael’s prediction is one hundred percent accurate. Magnus stops by the coffee shop the next morning to pick up coffee and pastries. Their new case is nothing out of the ordinary. Raphael curses creatively at his computer every time the operating system squawks with a warning message.

When he gets home that night, Magnus throws out his body wash. He orders a new one with a different scent and a ten pack of black T-shirts on the internet. His old NYPD shirt is irreplaceable.

Before he goes to bed, he checks that the window to the fire escape is unlocked and open just a crack. Because the window sticks and he doesn’t want to die if there’s a fire.

On day three, he joins a gym and starts putting in a couple hours every night after work and McKinney’s.

On the first weekend, Magnus squares his tab with Ma Lee and avoids her probing questions about “lucky cat girl”. He makes a promise to meet Shu Fang, Ma Lee’s niece, the next time she’s in town. 

On the second weekend, he dumps half a gallon of sour milk down his sink and throws the rest of the stale loaf of bread in the trash.

He does his best to forget. He’s always lived alone. It’s never bothered him before.

Routine settles in, and things go back to normal. The new normal with the perpetually open window and three hours a night at the gym. 

Raphael acts like nothing ever happened. He’s back to the hot-headed young detective with creative vulgar language skills who gets way too wrapped up in soccer games on TV. Not even his new fondness for chamomile tea can mellow that temper.

They’re bickering about their latest case when an unexpected gust of wind blows paperwork and office flotsam across their desks.

Magnus turns around to see the shimmer of a swirling portal appear right next to Clary’s Lair.

An unfamiliar Shadowhunter – white male, five foot ten, 170 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes – bursts out. He’s followed by the two-person team who broke into Magnus’s apartment two weeks ago.

“Clarissa Morgenstern, by the order of the Clave, you’re under arrest!”

“What?” Clary rolls back from her desk, deeper into her lair like that’s going to protect her. “That’s not me! Who are you? What--”

Magnus is already moving toward the commotion, drawing his gun. He ignores Raphael yelling behind him.

The door to Luke’s office bursts open.

“Dad!”

“Clary, run!” 

Luke charges at the Shadowhunters. His brown eyes flare bright green. There is a noise like breaking bones as Luke’s arms start to twist at a painful angle.

“Stay down, mutt!”

The red-headed warlock slams her palm flat toward the ground and Luke goes down like someone dropped an anvil on him.

The two Shadowhunters have pulled Clary out of her chair and are dragging her toward the portal. 

Magnus aims his gun at them.

“Let her go!”

“Bane? Again?”

The red-head throws something toward him.

Magnus’s stabilizing hand flies away from the butt of his gun with an instinctive swiping motion, deflects the unknown projectile, and returns just as quickly without ever losing his aim on the Shadowhunters.

“I said let her go!”

A glowing blade springs to life in the hand of the dark haired Shadowhunter and comes to rest at the base of Clary’s bobbing throat. She screams and jumps, nearly cutting herself before the guy pulls her back by her hair.

“Drop your gun or the girl dies.”

Magnus doesn’t think about it. It’s too personal. It’s biscuit, his favorite admin in the world, and there’s a blade at her throat.

He engages the safety with a sneer and changes his grip to hold the gun by the barrel before he crouches and places it on the floor. 

He can’t imagine what they want with her. It has to be about Alec and Izzy’s case. There is no other reason for them to show up at the precinct. He remembers Jace talking about the Clave executing people for sneezing at the wrong moment. They’re the type to make over the top examples.

“She’s just a girl,” he says calmly. “Let her go. If you need to make an example, take me.”

“Magnus! What are you doing?” Raphael barks behind him.

The Shadowhunters exchange a look. The blond one looks nervous.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“He’s asking so nicely,” the dark haired one drawls before he turns to the red-head. “Be a good girl, Iris.” He clicks his tongue and jerks his chin toward Magnus.

“Tas de fous.” The red-head shakes her head with a smirk. “It’s your funeral.”

She snaps her fingers and Magnus feels an invisible rope sling tight around him from shoulders to hips, pressing his arms to his sides. It pulls him painfully off his feet and drags him toward the red-head.

His eyes flash with anger, but before he can say or do anything, the blunt handle of a sword cracks across the back of his head.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning!** This chapter has some serious explicit violence in it. Also, it's very dramatic. Just remember that this is not the final chapter and it's going to be okay. Trust me *points at avatar*. Thanks :)
> 
> Also, thank you so much again and forever to everyone who is leaving comments and kudos and letting me know in any way how much you like this story. It makes me feel all warm and gooey on the inside.
> 
> ###### 

The next time Magnus wakes up, he’s alone in the dark. It feels like every bone in his body is aching with a dull tremor, and his eyes take a long time to adjust.

He’s trapped in a small cavern behind blackened bars that hum with a weird tone. The large stones in the walls are old, dark, and wet with mildew. There’s a steady din of wailing moans and water dripping somewhere in the distance. It reminds him of a horror movie set or a medieval prison. Magnus is not sure which is closer to the truth.

“What is this place?” he asks the darkness.

He almost jumps out of his skin when the darkness answers with a rasping chuckle.

“They call it the City of Bones,” it says in a tired female voice. “Don’t get used to it. They’ll probably transfer you soon. They like to reserve this hell hole for their own kind.”

Magnus feels a cold shiver run down his back. He remembers Raphael’s story. He will never forget what the Clave did to his partner.

“Are you one of them?” he asks.

The woman cackles, making every hair on Magnus’s body stand on end.

“No,” she says. 

“Then why are you in here?”

Talking to her is better than listening to the noises in the dark. It’s better than staring through the bars at nothing.

The woman sighs. “They’re just waiting for me to die. It won’t take long.”

Magnus flinches. “What did you do?”

“I worked for Valentine. Helped him kill a bunch of people. Shadowhunters, Downworlders, mundanes. They’re really just mad I helped him dwindle their precious numbers.”

“Why would you do that?”

“He poisoned me, bound me to his will. Typical Shadowhunter.”

His stomach twists. He’s glad that Alec and Izzy got kicked out. He hopes they ran far away. He tries not to think about the fact that Alec was still willing to protect the Shadowhunters despite everything.

Instead, he thinks of the way the dark-haired Shadowhunter clicked his tongue at the red-headed witch.

“Is that what happened to the French red-head with the sour face?”

“Iris?” the woman asks. “No, she’s Aldertree’s dog.” She sighs. “That’s all we are now, beaten dogs dragged along at the heels of our masters.”

Magnus sits up against the wall and gently bangs his head back on the stone. He has no idea where the Shadowhunters took Clary or what they plan to do to him.

“Do you have any idea why they’d want to kidnap mundanes?”

“Like who?”

There is a strange tone in her voice.

“Me for starters,” he says and tries to ignore that she chuckles. “My coworker, Clary Fairchild.”

The woman laughs. She cackles until she wheezes and only stops when she runs out of breath. When she finally gets herself together, she exhales a long, hard sigh.

“Oh, Magnus.”

He never told her his name.

“How do you know who I am?”

She sighs again. “In a really round-about way, I’m the reason you’re in here. I’m definitely the reason you have to ask me all these questions.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dot,” she says. “You don’t remember me, but I’m the one who put you under the jiwa kupu-kupu.”

The word is no longer an animal scratching at the backdoor to be let in. It’s a snarling hell beast, shredding away at flimsy wood with lethal teeth and claws.

“No.”

Magnus turns away. His stomach heaves. He shakes his head and clenches his teeth, breathing slowly through his nose to keep down the bile rising in his throat.

“Yeah,” she says, “I’m afraid so.”

He can’t deal with it. He can’t think about it. It’s not true. He rejects it and changes the subject.

“What about Clary? What do they want with a mundane admin assistant from Brooklyn?”

Dot giggles. “She grew up to be a secretary? Really? I figured someone with her lineage would go for queen of corporate hell.”

Magnus is too sick and worried and scared to interpret cryptic snark.

“What?”

“Clary Fairchild is the daughter of Jocelyn Fairchild and Valentine Morgenstern, the leaders of the nastiest Shadowhunter cult that ever existed. A fact that you would remember if you hadn’t made me erase your memories.”

“Stop!”

The hell beast is battering the door to his mind. It’s giving Magnus a screaming headache, creating blinding white light behind his tightly closed eyes. 

Dot doesn’t seem to care.

“You know, they’d never have been able to take you if you were still you.”

“Stop.”

“I don’t think I will,” she says. “I’m dying anyway, so I really don’t give a—“

“Magnus!”

The man’s voice is loud and on the edge of panic. It’s also vaguely familiar. It screams for him again, and Magnus looks out through the bars into the darkness with blurry eyes.

“I’m here!” he manages to shout.

There is a heavy rattle against the bars to his cell, and a pale face appears between them. A pair of glistening eyes peers at him under furrowed brows and messy blond hair.

Alec’s boyfriend came to see him. Isn’t that nice?

“Magnus, what happened?”

Magnus shakes his head and crawls closer to the bars so he doesn’t have to raise his voice.

“Your colleagues picked me up at the precinct. They took Clary, too.”

“Yeah, I just heard.” Jace’s eyes flit away like it’s not important. “They took you from the precinct? Does that mean Alec and Izzy are still safe at your place?”

The question hits Magnus from a blind spot. His fists clench in Jace’s jacket, nearly pulling him through the bars.

“What?”

Jace’s eyes go wide in horror. His breathing turns shallow as he grips the bars in front of Magnus. He looks sick with worry.

“They’re at your place, right?” he says shakily.

A chill runs down Magnus’s spine. He has no idea why Jace would think that. Magnus has been waiting for two weeks. In vain.

“They never came back.”

“No.” Jace shakes his head in denial. “I know they did. Alec was … determined.”

Magnus stops breathing as his stomach clenches hard. Hope and fear don’t sit well next to each other.

“He wanted to come back to me?”

Jace snorts. “He refused to go anywhere else.”

The words make Magnus laugh, even as he shakes with fear.

Alec is a stubborn ass. There’s no changing his mind when he gets like that. Not without one hell of a fight. And wherever Alec goes Izzy follows.

“I can track him,” Jace says suddenly. “Both of them. I hid things. But if the Clave has captured them, there’s no way I can break them out. Angel have mercy, what if … What if it’s too late? What if he’s … I can’t feel him anymore. His parabatai rune is gone. I can’t...”

A rasping cackle penetrates the silence.

“Poor thing,” Dot simpers, “sounds like you lost your soulmate. I know a guy who could help.”

Her facetious words cut straight through Magnus’s heart. Soulmates. Because, of course, Alec and Jace are not just Shadowhunter boyfriends, they're soulmates.

It doesn’t matter. Alec tried to come back. He tried to come back to Magnus, but the Shadowhunters took him. They took Izzy, too. And Clary.

Dot knows a guy who can help. That guy is Magnus. He just doesn’t remember being that guy. It’s painfully obvious what has to be done.

Magnus feels a strange sense of calm wash over him. His headache is gone. The beast at the door to his mind has gone quiet.

“Dot,” he says. “How do I break the spell?”

“All you have to do is say the words.” She inhales a rasping breath and says, “Release the butterfly.”

Magnus closes his eyes. He just knows.

“Membebaskan kupu-kupu.”

There is a sound like delicate glass cracking. Then the door is open and the beast is inside.

Magnus remembers everything. Four hundred years of joy and pain and magic. All at once. Every memory of his long, wretched life is crystal clear. Everyone he’s loved. Everyone he’s lost.

Camille, Ragnor, Catarina, Raphael. All in the span of a week. 

The grief is instantaneous. It fills him up to the brim and overflows with a soundless scream that chokes his throat and burns his eyes.

Alec. Izzy. Clary.

The Shadowhunters took all of them. And so much more.

He has no one. He has nothing. Nothing but burning grief that boils the blood inside his veins and makes them glow with demonic power he swore he’d never use.

_The descent into hell is easy._

He’ll show them just how easy.

Magnus barely hears the pained yelp over his roaring blood. He looks up through the demon eyes of his father, relishing the scorching heat as the bars to his prison cell glow orange and melt like candle wax.

The child of the Nephilim, Jace, is surrounded by a golden aura of angelic power. He’s on his back, scrabbling to crawl away from Magnus with an expression of shock and terror on his face.

As Magnus walks away, he hears the feeble cackle of Dorothea Rollins. She’s almost dead now. Her voice is barely a whisper.

“Sick ‘em, boy.”

The stones under his feet crack and burn. The rows of bars along both sides of the corridor glow and melt in his wake. Inside the dark holes of their cells, the prisoners scream.

A shrieking blood-red portal opens on the front lawn of the New York Institute. Magnus steps out and leaves a burning trail behind him, wet grass scorched to black.

Up the stone steps, the cement cracks and burns. The heavy wooden doors explode into splinters with a single glance. There’s no more need for hand motions.

A squawking alarm overpowers the sounds of frantic shouting and running feet. A tilt of his chin in the direction of the nearest siren ends the noise mid blast.

Shadowhunters come at him. They’re nothing but maggots dressed in black and armed with toys, and then they’re burning at his feet.

He remembers the way to the Head office. He’s been to this place before to improve their silly little wards, and clear their overtaxed ley lines, and identify magical maladies that left them stumped.

The door explodes into splinters. The man behind the desk jumps up with his angelic weapon drawn.

Magnus sniffs and breaks the wrist that holds the sword with a casual glance. Moves his gaze up and snaps the larger bones in the man’s forearm, just because he can.

The sword clatters to the ground and the man doubles over in pain.

Magnus pulls him up straight with a shift of his gaze until the man’s shiny shoes barely touch the floor.

“Alexander and Isabelle Lightwood. Clary Fairchild. Where are they?”

“Screw you, demon sc—”

The man’s tongue swells until it pushes out from behind his lips. He’s choking, grasping at his throat with his uninjured hand. The broken arm dangles uselessly from his side. His face goes red.

Magnus waits until the man’s face starts to turn purple. Then he looks into the frightened eyes and lets his magic drive right through them into the terrified mind beyond. He sifts through the man’s memories until he finds what he needs. It’s scattered and hazy, but it shows him enough.

He leaves the burnt body on the floor behind the desk, opens a shrieking blood-red portal in the middle of the room, and steps through it.

He steps out of the screaming portal into a dimly-lit hall. The prison cells in the basement of the Institute are sterile boxes with glass fronts stuffed between gray walls of grave markers. Stone tombs obstruct the path down the middle. White halo lights on the ceiling.

The burnt bodies of the guards fall at his feet like slabs of charred meat before they can touch him.

Magnus can feel the flames lick along his calves, reaching the backs of his knees. He feels it inside him, too, boiling through every vein, burning away his humanity.

He sees them at the very end of the hall.

Alec and Izzy are in separate cells, sitting with their backs against the wall that connects them.

They’re here. They’re alive.

Magnus closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

“Magnus!”

Alec’s voice.

The glass walls melt, the stones crack, and the lights flicker and explode.

He opens his eyes in time to see Alec and Izzy running toward him.

“No!”

His hands are up and Magnus steps back, steadfastly looking at the wall of grave markers beside him. The gray stone burns black under his gaze.

He points one finger in the opposite direction and hears the screaming portal open behind him.

“Go back to my apartment.”

The fire licks up around his hips. 

“Magnus?”

This time it’s Izzy’s voice. Quiet and scared.

“Both of you. Go. Now!”

He feels cold air move the flames across his skin as Alec and Izzy disappear and the portal closes behind them.

Magnus doesn’t wait a second before he looks up and glares another portal into existence.

On the other side of the fiery vortex is the vast main deck of a rusted cargo ship. It is crawling with scores of angelic maggots dressed in black. They are engaged in epic battle with each other and unaware of Magnus’s arrival.

Valentine Morgenstern is standing above it all, safe behind the railing on the ship’s bridge deck.

Decades of fear. Running and hiding. Dying. So many dead at the hands of this man.

He seems so small now.

“Valentine!”

Another man has yelled the name from the stairs leading up to the bridge deck. He’s tall, dark, with curly hair and a full beard. He’s holding Clary by her strawberry hair, pressing the blade of an angelic sword to her pale throat.

“Give back the soul sword or your daughter dies!”

Valentine is unmoved. “Don’t you see? We want the same thing! But unlike yours, my solution is final! How many do you think you can cure, Aldertree? How long before you run out of heavenly fire and everything’s back where it started with Shadowhunters going extinct and demons taking over the world?”

Magnus can feel his humanity burn out with every step he takes. He doesn’t have long now. No time to listen to maggots bickering.

He walks through the battlefield and up into the air, taking measured steps toward the bridge deck as the flames start licking at his chest.

He reaches Valentine first and the split second of stunned surprise is all it takes to finish the job.

Magnus touches his shoulder, like an old acquaintance trying to get his attention at a dinner party, and watches him burn from skin to flesh to bone to ash. As Valentine’s dust sprinkles onto the wet metal deck, Magnus turns his head to look in Aldertree’s general direction.

“Let the girl go,” he says calmly.

Aldertree’s sword clatters to the ground and the man runs away so quickly, he almost falls down the stairs.

“Magnus?!” Clary screeches. “Oh my god, Magnus! You’re on fire!”

Magnus chuckles, keeping his eyes on the ground. “I know.”

“Stop, drop, and roll, you idiot!” 

“It’s okay, biscuit,” he says. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Fire extinguisher. I need to--”

“Clary!”

The metal bars of the railing beside him melt like wax and the deck they’re standing on starts to crack and groan in protest. He’s losing control, and it’s going fast.

“What?”

Her voice is shaky and thick with tears.

Magnus points his finger at a spot between them. A screaming, blood-red portal opens.

“I want you to think, very hard, about your lair. Picture it in your mind. Then go through the portal and you’ll be there.”

“That’s insane.”

“Just do it, biscuit. For me?”

She sobs and makes a high-pitched, annoying little whining noise in her throat that usually means she’s going to protest, but then he hears her shoes squeak across the metal.

A gust of wind moves the flames that consume him.

He’s gone before the portal closes.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so glad everyone liked the previous chapter. I was a bit concerned what with all the bone breaking and fire starting... That part is over now, and we are headed toward the happy ending part of the story. With one or two minor hiccups left to overcome. Enjoy.
> 
> ###### 

Magnus regains consciousness to the smell of sulfur and brimstone and charred flesh. The air is hot enough to burn in his lungs and stick to his skin. What’s left of it. The light around him is a painful blend of oranges and reds that stings hard enough to make his eyes water.

The first thing he hears is a sarcastic slow clap.

“Brilliant work, son. Truly. I haven’t been this entertained in years. Though, personally, I would have dusted the other guy before he got to the bottom of the steps.”

“Asmodeus.”

Magnus’s voice sounds shredded.

It’s nothing like the smooth sarcastic drawl of his father. Of course, Asmodeus is a greater demon, not a sentimental half-human warlock who used up all his power and banished himself to Edom in a fit of grief-fueled rage.

“There’s just one thing I can’t figure out.”

Magnus doesn’t know what Asmodeus is talking about. He doesn’t care. He’s sure Asmodeus will tell him anyway.

“Why?” Asmodeus nearly whines the question before he barrels on in a sarcastic drawl. “I mean, really. You knew each other for less than a week. You had one romp on the kitchen floor with the boy, and you barely even hugged the girl. Was that really enough to trade away both your silly little fantasy _and_ your actual life?”

Magnus groans. His father would never understand. Trying to explain concepts like love, friendship, grief, and sacrifice to Asmodeus is like trying to explain summoning rituals to a goldfish. He just doesn’t have the capacity to comprehend.

“Wait,” Asmodeus says and cocks his head to the side. “You didn’t do it for the secretary, did you?”

Case in point.

“Just leave me alone.”

Asmodeus clicks his tongue. “The least you could do is say thank you for giving you a place to stay.”

Magnus rolls his eyes and turns away from the man he is doomed to spend the rest of eternity with.

Now that he has his memories back, Magnus does know quite a bit about fairy tales, myths, and legends, and their often not completely untruthful origins. He is also painfully aware that none of the things he knows are going to change the fact that he is trapped in this dimension forever.

Like any known version of hell, Edom is easy to get into but impossible to escape. 

The smartest thing to do would be to let go and move on.

Instead, Magnus immediately makes things harder on himself by seeking out the mirror room in Asmodeus’s twisted castle. He knows it’s there. It’s the only way Asmodeus could have kept abreast of Magnus’s life in New York from Edom.

The spell doesn’t actually require a connection between two mirrors. As long as you know how to make the connection, any reflective surface will do.

Before his skin can even begin to heal from burning alive, Magnus locks himself inside the dark room with the enormous mirror connected to every reflective surface in the life he used to live.

Alec and Izzy are still at his apartment in Chinatown. Magnus can see them through the dark TV screen, the kitchen sink, the glass of the microwave door above the stove, and half a dozen other surfaces scattered throughout his small apartment.

Alec is pacing the living room in long angry strides. His arms are crossed so tightly over his chest that his biceps flex. He’s still wearing Magnus’s NYPD shirt and jeans. The same thing he wore when he and Izzy disappeared two weeks ago.

“Where is he?” he snarls. “It’s been an hour.”

Izzy is toweling her hair in the bathroom door. She’s wearing one of Magnus’s new black T-shirts and a pair of silk boxers that Magnus barely remembers owning. She must have dragged it from the bottom of his dresser.

“He’s fine. He has to be.”

She doesn’t sound like she believes it. How could she?

Magnus has a pretty good idea what he looked like when they last saw him.

“He was burning, Iz. Real fire. Up to his waist.”

“I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

She’s chewing on her bottom lip hard enough to make it bleed.

Magnus wants to snap at her to stop, but it wouldn’t do any good. They can’t hear him. They have no idea he sees and hears them.

Alec’s arms tighten even more around his chest as he stares at the floor. His jaw clenches.

“He didn’t even look at me.”

Magnus feels terrible about that. They never even got to say goodbye. If he could have, he--

“Dumbass!”

Izzy’s yell jolts Magnus as much as the hard snap of the towel jostles Alec.

“He literally scorched a hole in the wall just by looking at it,” she says. “Did you really want him to burn your face off?”

“No,” Alec admits grumpily, “but what if—”

“Alec, I swear,” she snaps, tossing the towel back into the bathroom, “if you don’t stop, I will walk into that kitchen, grab the potato masher, and beat you over the head with it until you’re nothing but mush!”

Magnus can’t help the rasp of laughter that escapes his mouth. He wonders if oddly specific outlandish threats of violence can be an STD.

Alec’s expression doesn’t change. His voice is so low, Magnus barely catches it when he speaks again.

“I’m scared, Iz.”

“I know,” she says. “Me too.”

Izzy slips her arms around Alec’s waist and buries her face in her big brother’s chest.

Magnus watches with a lump in his throat, pain in his chest, and envy in his gut.

Alec wraps his arms around her shoulders and sticks his nose in her hair.

“I didn’t even get to tell him.”

Izzy punches her brother’s ribs. Hard.

“You’ll tell him when he gets home.”

Magnus would give anything to walk into his apartment and tell them he’s okay. He wants to hear what Alec has to say to him. Anything he wants to tell him.

Unfortunately, no matter what he offers, nothing in this realm can grant Magnus his wish.

A wave from his charred hand changes the connection. Magnus never saw the portal close. He needs to make sure that Clary got back to the precinct in one piece.

The first face Magnus sees is not Clary’s. It’s Raphael, scowling at Luke inside the captain’s office because the best connection is from the glass of the framed certificates on the walls.

“Are you going to give me an explanation or am I going to have to drum up a bunch of genuine silverware?”

Luke’s answering snarl is less than human.

“Very funny,” he says. “How do you even know that? You some paranormal fanboy or something?”

Raphael’s expression is smooth but intense.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says coolly, “What matters is that Shadowhunters took your daughter and Magnus, and only Clary came back, so will you tell me what happened voluntarily or do I have to torture it out of you?”

“Raphael!”

Clary’s strained voice is coming from somewhere below Raphael. Magnus switches perspective to the shiny name plate on Luke’s desk.

She’s sitting in one of the visitor chairs, curled up into a tiny ball.

“He’s gone,” she whispers, sniffling. Fat tears start rolling down her cheeks. “Magnus is… It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is. Just tell him whatever he wants to know, Dad. I don’t care!” Her voice is squeaky and broken.

Magnus feels for her. He can’t even imagine what he looked like by the time she saw him on the bridge deck of Valentine’s ship. Crap. She watched him immolate a man to a pile of ash, right in front of her face. Magnus was pretty much completely engulfed in flames at that point, too.

“I’m so sorry, biscuit,” he says.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” Luke says at almost the same time. “This was never supposed to happen.”

Raphael’s unimpressed scowl comes back into view as he sinks into the visitor chair beside Clary.

Magnus can’t see Luke without switching perspective, but he doesn’t need to see him to hear his gruff voice or the familiar creaky groan of his old leather office chair when Luke leans heavily back into it.

“The Clave has always known about Clary. That’s why Jocelyn put her in my care before she went on the run.”

“My mom is alive?” Clary’s voice is a breathless squeak.

“I don’t know, kiddo.” Luke’s voice is tired and miserable. “I haven’t heard from her in eighteen years.” He sighs. “She knew the Shadowhunters would never stop chasing her. If they thought Jocelyn had abandoned her child, they wouldn’t come after Clary to use her as leverage. It worked.”

“Until today,” Raphael drawls.

Luke growls. “We all thought Valentine was dead.”

Clary exhales a hiccuping giggle, tears streaming down her face.

“He is now,” she says. “Poof.”

She raises her hand and blows a stream of air across it like she’s blowing dust off her palm. Then she shakes her head and looks with wounded eyes at Luke across the desk.

“So, the crazy tattooed people weren’t lying,” she says. “My name is actually Clarissa Morgenstern and Valentine was my father?”

“Only in the sense that he got your mother pregnant.” Luke’s voice is firm. “I’m your dad. Your mother and I loved each other. She would have never left you if—“

Raphael makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and scowls at the poor biscuit in a way that has Magnus convinced he is threatening her with all kinds of outlandish, implausible acts of violence inside his head.

“Clary,” he says in his best imitation of a person with patience. “I know this is difficult, and you have a lot of personal stuff that you want to work out, but before you do that, would you please tell me what happened to Magnus after they dragged both of you into the portal and before you came back here alone?”

She does.

Magnus doesn’t stay to listen.

He switches back to the reflective surfaces in his own apartment and gets hit with an instant explosion of disbelief, shock, and blind jealousy.

Alec and Jace are standing in the middle of his living room, hugging each other fiercely. Again.

“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Jace breathes into Alec’s neck.

“Magnus saved us,” Alec breathes back.

“And yet he gets all the love!” Magnus screams impotently in the dark, trapped on the other side of a magical mirror.

Jace pulls back like a thief caught in the act.

“Where is Magnus?”

A fleeting grimace of abject terror crosses Jace’s pale face before he manages to smooth it out into something that shakily resembles cool bravado.

Magnus doesn’t blame him. It’s not every day you get to see the son of a greater demon spectacularly lose his shit.

“We don’t know,” Alec says.

The look on his face makes Magnus want to bang his fists against the mirror and scream until his voice is hoarse, but there’s no point.

“I’m here,” he says anyway. “I’ll always be right here.”

Magnus hears the door to his apartment open. He catches a glimpse of Izzy through the mirror in his hallway as she walks inside with bags full of groceries.

“I told Ma Lee that we’re back,” she says resolutely. “I also told her Magnus won’t be hooking up with her niece because he’s already dating somebody else. She took it well. Oh. Hi, Jace.”

Isabelle Lightwood, queen of denial.

Magnus laughs with wet eyes and watches through the shiny handles of his kitchen cabinets while she restocks his fridge.

“Hey, Izzy,” Jace says, before he shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “So, you guys are planning to stay here?”

Alec crosses his arms and goes into full pack mule mode.

“At least until Magnus comes home.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Jace!” Izzy barks from the kitchenette.

The look on Alec’s face is so dark it drains the light in the room.

Jace raises his hands, shakes his head, and leaves the apartment without saying another word.

Alec and Izzy stay. Magnus watches them for the rest of the day. Alec eventually goes to sleep in the bedroom. Izzy makes her bed on the couch. 

Magnus promises himself not to be a creepy stalker in the corner.

Then he still ends up watching Alec lay awake in bed through the glossy screen of his alarm clock.

Magnus falls asleep first, curled up on the hard floor in the empty mirror room.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all,  
> back with another chapter. For anyone expecting a long, arduous stay in Edom... I'm sorry if the next couple of chapters disappoint, but I was not going to turn this story into an epic saga like BDC is turning out to be. I hope you still enjoy it for what it is. Let me know what you think. Your feedback and kudos always make my days brighter.
> 
> ###### 

His skin itches and flakes as it heals. It’s driving Magnus insane. Not as insane as watching through windows, and mirrors, and glossy screens while life moves on without him.

Alec gets antsier by the day, doing nothing but pace the apartment and go through closets and drawers like the answer to Magnus’s fate is hiding in his clothes or makeup.

Izzy applies her considerable skills of denial and gets herself a job working under the table for Ma Lee.

Four days in, the levees break.

Alec grabs the spare set of keys from the junk drawer and storms out of the apartment so fast, Magnus can barely keep up with him. He has no idea where Alec is going and no reflective surfaces to work with until he gets down to the street.

His heart stops when he catches Alec’s reflection pass by shop windows and cars parked on the curb. He’s heading straight for the precinct.

Magnus watches helplessly through a dusty surveillance mirror in a ceiling corner as the beautiful monster brings the full brunt of his obstinate persona to bear on the poor person at the front desk.

“I need to speak to Raphael. Now.”

He's going to get himself killed.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” Raphael drawls on his way down the stairs from the upper level.

“We need to talk,” Alec’s tone is all ice and no chill. “It’s about Magnus.”

Magnus follows them through a bunch of reflective surfaces until they end up in Interrogation Room 2. It almost makes him want to laugh if he wasn’t so damn tense.

Raphael closes the door and puts his hands on his hips. His gun is clearly visible in its holster.

“What do you want?”

Alec’s tension is palpable. His arms are crossed over his chest, his shoulders tight, his jaw clenched.

“Magnus hasn’t come home. It’s been four days. Something happened to him, and I need to know.”

His eyes drill into Raphael like he’s equally willing to beg or torture the man in front of him to get the answers he seeks.

“Home?” Raphael sniffs, shaking his head toward the ceiling. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Alec’s jaw clenches harder.

“I don’t know you,” he says through his teeth, “and you don’t know me. You hate Shadowhunters. I get that, but I know you care about Magnus. You kicked us out to protect him. Something bad happened. I need to find him.”

Raphael’s expression softens. It’s an uncanny look that doesn’t belong on his face.

“Kid,” he says quietly. “Magnus is dead.”

“I am not!” Magnus shouts.

Jumping to premature conclusions has always been one of Raphael’s most irritating flaws. The memories of the fledgling vampire who became a surrogate son to Magnus flow seamlessly into those of Raphael the young detective who became Magnus’s partner and best friend.

Alec’s stubborn scowl deepens as he shakes his head.

“I don’t believe it.” He raises his chin and stares hard at Raphael. “He’s a warlock. They don’t die easily.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, kid.”

Magnus cringes. Calling Alec a child is a quick way to piss him off.

Alec’s response is surprisingly calm and reasonable.

“Tell me what you know. If I’m going to find him, I need to know what happened.”

“Look,” Raphael says with a sigh, “the best I can figure from what I’ve been told is that he literally burnt himself out to save a bunch of idiot Nephilim kids.”

Close. Okay, Raphael’s assessment is one hundred percent accurate, but it’s missing a crucial little detail. Magnus is not dead. He’s just stuck in Edom. Forever.

“How?” Alec asks stubbornly.

Raphael scoffs and raises his eyebrows over an exasperated glare. “Do I look like a warlock library? If you want to know, make an inquiry to the Spiral Labyrinth.”

Considering that the location of the Spiral Labyrinth is a mystery even to the Children of the Nephilim, the remark is a bit like telling a kid to write a letter to Santa.

Alec grits his teeth and takes a calming breath.

“Do you know any other warlocks I can ask?”

Raphael glares at him.

“Your kind has killed every warlock I’ve ever called my friend.”

The pain flares sudden and bright like a stun grenade or a blinding spell.

Catarina, Ragnor. Now Raphael thinks Magnus is dead, too.

“I’m not dead,” he says to Raphael’s reflection in the interrogation room’s one-way mirror. “I promise.”

More days go by. Magnus watches from his self-imposed solitary confinement. Asmodeus only stops by once or twice to make an acerbic remark through the locked door before he completely loses interest in his boring offspring.

Jace stops by the apartment a few times. Each time he and Alec hug, Magnus’s stomach twists itself into knots.

Even with his memories restored, knowing what parabatai are – that there is never anything physical or romantic between them – Magnus still feels an instinctive jealousy over Alec’s relationship with Jace.

That's also why he is childishly pleased that Alec spends the whole time they’re together grilling Jace for information on warlock magic, and fire spells, and any possible Downworld contacts that might know anything about what happened to Magnus.

It’s on the fifth visit that Jace finally loses his patience.

“Look, I got nothing!” Jace throws his hands up. “Even if someone knows anything, they won’t give Shadowhunters the time of day until we fix the Accords, which is going to take forever thanks to the older generations screwing everything up!”

Jace’s frustration is palpable, but Magnus can’t find it in himself to pity the boy. It’s his choice to stick with an organization that used to hunt warlocks for sport and now wants to rebrand itself as a benevolent authority.

Alec gnashes his teeth and crosses his arms tighter in front of his chest.

“Somebody has to be willing to talk.”

Jace makes a frustrated noise and rips his fingers through his hair.

“You’re not listening,” he growls. “You know what? I’m done. If you want to take a crack at it, just have Izzy contact her ex-boyfriend!”

Alec’s scowl disappears with a look like Jace slapped him across the face.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ask her!” Jace barks as he storms off toward the front door.

“Where are you going?”

“Out to kill something!”

When Izzy gets home from work that evening, Alec is waiting for her on the couch a lot like Magnus waited for him when he had a bone to pick.

“Hey, I thought Jace was coming over,” she trills happily on her way to the kitchenette. “Ma Lee says hi. She says you need to eat more kale, whatever that means. Want me to try to make some for dinner?”

Alec doesn’t get up from the couch. He turns off the TV and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Jace already left,” he says and then asks, “Who’s your ex-boyfriend?”

Izzy fumbles the cold chicken bun between her fingers before she gets it into the microwave.

“Um, nobody?” Her voice is high-pitched and thin. She clears her throat and tries again. “Just a guy. It was nothing. We only dated for a couple of months.”

Alec drops his arms and gets up from the couch to confront her face to face.

“Then why does Jace think he might be a good person to ask about what happened to Magnus?”

“Oh.” Izzy blinks. Then the color drains from her face as her dark eyes go wide and she starts to shake her head. “No. No, he’s not. In fact, that’s a really bad idea. Jace shouldn’t have said that.”

“Izzy,” Alec’s tone is calm, but it’s clear he’s on the verge of shouting. “Tell me.”

She bites her bottom lip, Magnus’s favorite shade of red lipstick, and looks up at her brother like she knows she did something bad and she’s just trying to figure out how to wiggle her way out before it causes a major disaster.

“He kinda sorta might have been a little bit of a…” She closes her eyes and ducks her head. “Seelie.”

Alec’s explosion is instantaneous.

“You dated a Seelie?!”

“It was only for a couple months!”

“You know how dangerous they are!”

Izzy crosses her arms in a very familiar way. The family resemblance is undeniable.

“You’re dating a warlock!”

“That is so not the same!”

“If it wasn’t for Meliorn, we would’ve never gotten out of the police station.”

Alec makes a noise that is twenty percent realization and eighty percent raw anger.

“I knew you were lying about where you got those portal seeds!”

Magnus does not stick around for the rest of the fight. He wipes an almost healed hand across the surface of the mirror and goes through dozens of familiar reflective surfaces to track down Raphael.

Raphael is at McKinney’s, sitting alone at their usual table. He’s starting to get wrapped up in a soccer game on TV, but he hasn’t reached the critical stage yet.

The back of a tall brunet man in faded jeans and a well-worn windbreaker blocks Magnus’s view.

“This seat taken?”

Magnus changes to the view from the mirror behind the bar in time to see Raphael look up with an expression that has sent vampires running for their lives.

The brunet guy smiles nervously and raises his hands in defense.

“The place is pretty packed, and I just want to catch the game while I’m waiting for my girlfriend to finish her shift.”

He points one thumb behind him to the pretty, curly-haired bartender with sparkling brown eyes, a complexion like sweet hot chocolate, and a smile that used to make Magnus outrageously over-tip her. Maia. He never learned her last name.

Raphael’s eyes narrow at Maia’s boyfriend. “What team?”

“Argentina, of course,” the guy says without missing a beat.

“Fine, sit down.” Raphael pushes the chair out with the heel of his boot. “But no stupid comments.”

Ten minutes later, they’re both completely wrapped up in the game. They’re so busy shouting at the TV and bickering with each other, that they barely take the time to say thanks when Maia comes over and places a couple fresh pints on the table between them.

Magnus watches them for a while, feeling warm and fuzzy at the thought that Raphael may have just made his first new friend in decades.

The warm and fuzzies evaporate quickly when Magnus switches back to his apartment. The whole place is dark. Izzy and Alec are nowhere to be found.

Magnus flips randomly through the reflective surfaces in the vicinity. He starts at Ma Lee’s and works his way through the neighborhood. He even checks the diner near the precinct where the three of them shared their first meal.

The longer he looks and doesn’t find them, the more worried he gets.

The last snippet he heard of Alec and Izzy’s conversation plays over and over in Magnus’s head.

Izzy’s ex-boyfriend is a Seelie.

The faerie creatures are incapable of telling a lie, which makes them all the more dangerous because they’ve learned to twist the truth so far out of shape its own mother wouldn’t recognize it.

They also have powerful magic. More powerful than warlock magic, some might argue.

They also have a nasty bitch for a queen who likes nothing more than to make deals of desperation that would put any crossroads demon to shame.

By the time Magnus flicks back around to the blank TV in his apartment, it’s long after midnight, and he’s way past worry into cold, hard fear.

Izzy is sitting on the couch, wrapped up in Magnus’s comforter, wearing the T-shirt and silk-boxers combo that’s become a staple when she's at home.

Alec is nowhere in the apartment.

Magnus can feel his heart twist like a wet rag in his chest.

“Oh, you reckless, stubborn ass. What did you do?”

“Magnus?”

His heart flat out stops beating. Then it restarts with a heavy thump.

“Izzy? Can you hear me?”

He can’t believe it. Did Alec trade himself away to the Seelie Queen just so that Izzy could talk to him across dimensions?

Izzy doesn’t react. She clenches the comforter tightly to her chest and stares at the carpet between the couch and the coffee table.

“I don’t know if you can actually hear me from down there,” she says, “but you better be there. You better, because Alec’s coming for you, and if you’re not there, and if you two don’t make it back, I will never, ever, ever forgive you. Either of you. Do you hear me?”

She starts to cry and grabs the remote, turning on the TV with a stubborn scowl that looks exactly like her brother’s.

“Oh, kitten.”

Magnus’s heart is broken, but his mind is racing.

Alec’s coming for him.

What the hell does she mean by that?

It’s not like there’s an actual highway to hell for Alec to just come and pick him up.

Who in this world or any other has ever gone to hell and come back? Summoning rituals aside.

Oh, crap.

Magnus remembers with sudden clarity his unfortunate prolonged conversation with the Seelie Queen at one of the many, many tedious gatherings to discuss the signing of the first Accords.

He stupidly claimed he had known the real Prometheus.

She laughed in his face, called him a terrible liar, and then proceeded to tell him all about the real Prometheus, which devolved into hours of listening to her ramble about her penchant for Greek myths and their deviation from the true historical events they were based on.

Magnus knows exactly the one she would have picked for him and Alec.

The stupid, stubborn, beautiful ass.

He races out of the mirror room as quickly as he can.

“Asmodeus!”

He needs to get to his father before Alec does. There’s no way to know what the greater demon would do.

“You want me to what?”

Asmodeus beholds Magnus from his sprawl across a twisted throne as if Magnus has lost his mind.

“I want you to let me go,” Magnus says calmly. “With Alec. Alive and Unharmed. Both of us.”

He doesn’t have the capacity to out-think his father and cover every loophole. He can barely even think straight, knowing that Alec is somehow on his way here to take a stab at their own version of a Greek myth that, by the way, ended in tragedy and death for everyone involved.

Magnus can only hope against hope that there is a shred of something inside the greater demon who spawned him that will move him to allow his offspring to leave Edom with the reckless, stubborn ass of a Shadowhunter who was dumb enough to think he could break into hell and walk back out.

Asmodeus laughs. Long and hard.

“We’re doing this? Really?” he asks and waves a dramatic hand across an imaginary banner in the air. “Orpheus and Eurydice, the modern queer version.” He smiles devilishly. “Do I get to be Hades?” 

Magnus can feel his nerves fray. The ones that have recovered from being burned. Some areas are still numb.

“Asmodeus, please.”

He shouldn’t give a greater demon that much power over him, but he has no choice. Alec is coming here. He has made some kind of terrible deal with the Seelie Queen to be able to do it. Magnus will not let him get killed by Asmodeus just for kicks.

Asmodeus clicks his tongue. 

“Very well,” he says, and his demeanor is that of a salesman who knows his customer has no choice but to buy. “I will give you choices and let you pick the one you prefer.”

He leans against the arm of his throne and raises his left hand, index finger extended.

“One: He comes down here. I kill him. You throw a tantrum for a few centuries and eventually come around to my side of things.”

Magnus shakes his head no, lips pressed so tightly together he can feel his teeth cut into the soft skin on the inside of his mouth.

Asmodeus sighs and extends his middle finger alongside the index finger.

“Two,” he says. “He comes down here. I don’t kill him. Instead, I watch him try to struggle his way to you, and he dies anyway because Edom is huge, toxic to anyone without demon blood, and he will never find you if I don’t want him to.”

Magnus keeps his mouth shut.

Asmodeus raises his ring finger with a facetious smile.

“Three: I turn him around at the entrance, wipe his memory, send him right back home, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

Magnus closes his eyes. If that is the best he can hope for, he is willing to take the deal. He opens his mouth to say so, when Asmodeus unexpectedly continues to speak.

“Four: You let me take your magic. I will make sure you and your angel-boy find each other, and then you can take a straight shot at the classic myth. I’ll even let you explain the rules to him before you start. If the two of you make it back to the other side, you can live the rest of your life as a mundane cop from New York.”

“Four.” The word has slipped from Magnus’s lips before he’s even thought about it. He doesn’t need to think about it. “I choose number four.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm happy everyone's still enjoying this so much. We're on the home stretch, and it's really only the wrap up now to take care of. Let me know what you think.
> 
> ###### 

Alec finds him sitting on a large black rock at the yawning mouth of a black cave.

Asmodeus also decided to dress Magnus in the prevalent fashion of 500 BC, which is to say a linen tunic and leather sandals that will not be weather appropriate if they actually make it back to New York.

“Magnus!”

There is an instant of shock when Alec gets his first good look at him, but it’s there and gone in a second.

Alec is on top of him, arms around his back, face buried against his shoulder, hugging him so fiercely Magnus literally can’t breathe. It hurts. It’s perfect.

“Hey,” he manages to get the word out.

Alec pulls back but only far enough to look at him. His hands don’t let go of Magnus, cradling his cheek, squeezing his arms, lacing their fingers.

“Are you okay?”

Magnus makes a noncommittal noise and cocks his head to the side. The answer depends entirely on the way you define okay.

Alec scowls. Determination is carved into every line of his beautiful face as he tightens his hold on Magnus’s fingers.

“I’m getting you out of here,” he says, pulling Magnus in the direction of the cave. “Come on.”

“Wait!” Magnus holds him back with a frantic tug on his hand.

Alec turns back. There is concern woven into the determination. His long dark brows are knitted tightly over the straight ridge of his nose.

“What’s wrong?”

Magnus wants to kiss him, but he really needs to get this off his chest first. He’s not sure how much time Asmodeus is willing to allow for the explanation part of the myth.

“I need you to listen to me,” he says, “and then I need you to do exactly what I ask. Can you do that?”

Alec blinks and says, “Of course,” as if he’s never been obstinate about anything in his whole life. 

Magnus laughs. Then he quickly sobers up.

“Have you ever heard the myth about … Never mind. The only way we’re getting out of here is through that cave.” He points at the cave that Alec came out of.

“I know,” Alec says, “I’ve memorized the way. I’ll get us back, don’t worry—”

“Oh for… Shut up!”

Alec snaps his mouth shut, but he’s giving Magnus a look that is anything but deferential.

Magnus places one hand on Alec’s tightly clenched jaw and smiles.

“You’ll have to walk in front of me, and you can’t look back. You won’t be able to hear me behind you, not even my footsteps. I won’t be able to touch you. You’ll have to just trust that I’m there, the whole way, until we come out on the other side. Do you think you can do that?”

“Like Orpheus and Eurydice?” Alec says blandly.

“Yeah, exactly like that.”

“What if something happens? What if—”

“Alexander,” Magnus says and hates that it’s coming out shaky. “I need you to make that infuriating obstinacy work in our favor just this once. Cross your arms, clench your jaw, turn your back, and storm off. It’s okay. Trust me. I will always be right behind you.”

Before the full weight of Magnus’s words could possibly have sunk in, Alec grabs his face and kisses him.

There are too many emotions crammed into the painful grip on his jaw, the trembling lips on his mouth, and the salt and sulfur taste on his tongue to even begin to sort them out. Magnus squeezes his eyes shut and lets himself feel all of them.

When Alec pulls back, he’s already gone full pack mule.

“This will be the last time I ever turn my back on you. I promise.”

Okay, maybe the meaning of Magnus’s words did have time to sink in.

He nods and grips Alec’s wrists tightly, forcing him to let go.

“Go on,” he says. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.” And just because he can’t help himself, he adds. “Just close your eyes, think firmly about home, and then just keep walking until I tell you we’re there.”

Alec snorts and shakes his head, but he doesn’t look back. “If I close my eyes, I’m going to run into a wall and get both of us lost.”

He crosses the threshold into the cave and Magnus is right behind him, keeping his eyes on the gorgeous broad back dressed in one of Magnus’s new plain black T-shirts.

“Just lead the way, pretty boy,” he drawls as they take their first steps inside the darkness.

“Magnus?” Alec’s tone is suddenly hesitant.

Magnus watches the broad back stiffen. He sees the moment when Alec almost turns his head. Then it snaps resolutely to the front. Alec sets his shoulders in a rigid line and starts walking at a brisk pace.

“It’s okay. I’m just going to assume you made a snarky comment about getting on with it.” There’s a smile in his voice. “Probably called me an ass.”

Close, but no cigar. In the future, Magnus will have to make sure to call Alec pretty more often than he calls him an ass.

The walk is longer than it has any right to be. Not that Magnus has any idea what the average length of an inter-dimensional cave system should be.

Alec doesn’t talk. It drives Magnus crazy because it would really help to soothe his nerves with a steady stream of pretend conversation.

Magnus has stopped talking as well. It was fun, for a while, to confess all the things he would never say if Alec could actually hear him, but the novelty has worn off.

Now there’s just the sound of Alec’s stomping footsteps and the never changing landscape of craggy rock tunnels bathed in the eerie blue light from the bio-luminescent mushrooms that grow along the walls of the cave.

He just wants to get home.

Izzy is probably crazy with worry.

He has no idea what time it is in New York or how long she has been waiting for them. It could be hours; it could be days. For all he knows, it could be months. Again, with his general lack of knowledge of inter-dimensional geography.

When they finally do step out of the dark caves into the blinding light of early morning, it is unfeasibly through the small cluster of craggy rocks at the southern end of Central Park.

The sun is still rising over the city. Only the most determined runners are dotting the concrete paths around them.

“We’re home,” Magnus says as he sets foot onto the grass and takes a few shaky steps away from the rocks.

Alec whirls around and grabs him in a hug, hauling him off his feet, three inches above the ground.

“We’re home.” He shouts the words into Magnus’s shoulder, squeezing the stuffing out of him before he puts him back on his feet. “Man, my feet are killing me. Any chance you can portal us home?”

Magnus chuckles weakly. He didn’t think the topic would come up so quickly.

“Actually,” he says, “I can’t.”

Alec doesn’t seem disappointed. He just rolls his eyes and smiles as if it’s no big deal.

“I’m sorry. Yeah, you must be exhausted, too. We’ll just grab a taxi or something.”

“No,” Magnus says, “that’s not what I meant.”

The smile slips off Alec’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

Magnus sighs. He’s tired and cold, and he really would have preferred to have this conversation at home on his couch with whatever is left of his bottle of scotch. His feet are killing him, too.

Still, maybe it’s better to get it over with.

“Come on, let’s sit down.”

Alec lets him lead them to a nearby park bench. They sit down side by side. Alec doesn’t let go of his hand.

Magnus turns his gaze to the vast stretch of grass behind the chain-link fence on the other side of the path. It’s easier than looking directly at Alec while he does this.

“There was a price for getting us out of Edom alive.”

“Yeah, I know.” Alec’s heroic scowl is audible in his tone. “I made a deal with the Seelie Queen.”

“Again, not what I meant.” Magnus clicks his tongue with a grimace. “But we’re going to have a long, unpleasant conversation about that when we get home. It might get loud.” When Alec shifts with a deep inhale, Magnus squeezes his fingers and reiterates, “At home.”

Alec releases his breath slowly through his nose. Magnus knows without looking that Alec’s glowering at him over flared nostrils. To his credit, he still hasn’t let go of Magnus’s hand.

Magnus licks his dry lips and takes a moment to collect his thoughts. Where to start?

“My father is a greater demon. Asmodeus.” He feels Alec jolt. “I guess you’ve heard of him.”

“Yeah,” Alec confirms and tightens his grip on Magnus’s hand. “What did he do to you?”

Magnus chuckles. What didn’t Asmodeus do to him? But that was a conversation for another time.

“In order to give both of us the chance to get back to New York alive, I agreed to let him take away my magic.”

The silence that follows stretches so long, Magnus can’t keep staring at the grass. He risks taking a glance to the side.

Alec’s mouth his half-open, his eyes wide, and he’s staring at Magnus a little like he did when they were tangled up on the kitchen mat.

“You gave up your immortality?” he asks thinly. “For me?”

His face is so open and awed and young that Magnus almost wants to leave it at that, but it’s not the truth, and he’s not going to start lying to Alec now.

“No,” he says honestly. “At least, not entirely for you.”

The awed expression disappears from Alec’s face. It breaks Magnus’s heart, but Alec needs to hear this and understand it if they are ever going to have a real chance with each other. Especially now that Magnus is a real mundane.

“I’m four hundred years old,” he says. “Give or take a few years.”

Magnus feels Alec go rigid beside him. He still remembers them on the kitchen mat. Alec telling him he wasn’t _that_ old. Oh, the irony. He presses his lips together to stifle an inappropriate smile before he gets back to what he is trying to explain.

“It takes a particular type of person to live that long and not let it get to you.”

He struggles for words, starting and discarding sentences in his mind. How does he explain the burden of immortality? How does he phrase it so that Alec will understand?

“I care about people. A lot. Very quickly and very deeply. I’ve always been that way. Even when I went really bad for a while, I still couldn’t ...”

He cuts himself off. There is no need to delve into the dark years with Asmodeus.

“Anyway,” he says and exhales a shaky breath. “The longer you live, the more people you lose.”

He can’t remember every name or face, but he remembers enough. Every time it happens, it’s like the first time all over again.

“I’ve lost a lot of people. Not just mortal ones. Immortal people I loved, whom I thought would be by my side forever, were snuffed out in the blink of an eye.”

Magnus thinks of Catarina, Ragnor, and Camille. He still feels the loss of Raphael, too, even though logically he knows now that Raphael is alive and well.

“A few years ago, I lost the four people I loved the most within the span of a week.”

He was never any good at coping with grief. That week, there had been no one left to help him through it.

“I would have killed myself,” he says honestly, “but unfortunately I had made a binding promise to one of them that I would never try to do that again, so I took the next best option.”

“The spell,” Alec mutters.

Magnus nods. “I was going to give away my magic, be a mundane, and work in a job that would get me killed before too long.”

Alec squeezes his fingers. “I’m glad it didn’t work out that way.”

Magnus returns the squeeze with a smile. “Yeah, me too.”

He will have to get Raphael to explain how he convinced Dot to let Magnus keep his magic. It was supposed to be Dot’s payment for blocking his memories and creating an entire mundane history in its place.

“The point is,” he says, “I’m not the kind of person who can handle immortality. I gave it up because I didn’t want it. Yes, it saved you, but it wasn’t all for you.” Magnus forces himself to look Alec in the eyes. “Asmodeus gave me choices. I could have let him wipe your memory and send you back unharmed. I made the selfish choice.”

Alec’s brows furrow in confusion. For the first time he starts to pull away.

Magnus grabs both his hands and holds on tight.

“I want to be with you, and I want to be a mundane cop from New York.”

He’s struggling for words again, knowing that his next ones might cost him everything.

“But I won’t be able to have both if you’re still part of the shadow world. I can’t.”

He knows he’s holding on too tight when Alec winces, but there’s no taking it back now.

“I can’t sit on the couch every night, wondering if you’re going to come back from patrol alive. I realize how that sounds coming from a cop, but trust me, being a detective is ninety percent paperwork and ten percent action, so it’s really not the same.”

The words are coming faster now that he doesn’t try to think about them.

“I want you, and I want you and Izzy to stay with me, but if you want to keep hunting demons… If that’s what you want, I’ll help you two find your own place and get back on your feet, but we won’t be together.”

It hurts just a little less than burning himself down to Edom, but the words are out there, and he won’t take them back. He’s made his decision. Alec will have to make his own.

“You don’t need to decide right now,” he says quickly. “I know I’m springing this on you, and after you just literally went to hell and back for me, but I needed you to know.”

Alec doesn’t say anything. He just sits quietly next to Magnus with a serious expression, furrowed hero brow, and stubborn jawline. Jaded beyond his years.

Magnus wants to kiss him so badly. He can still taste the salt and sulfur of Edom on his tongue. He forces himself to loosen his grip instead. If Alec wants to pull away, he’s not going to stop him.

Alec does let go of one hand, but he shifts his grip and holds on tightly to Magnus’s other one.

“Can we go home now?”

Magnus has no idea what it means, but he told Alec he would give him time to decide and he meant it.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go home. I need a long hot shower.”

Alec pulls him to his feet, wraps one arm around his shoulders, and pulls him tight against his side. Magnus doesn’t bother to pretend he’s not grateful for the warmth or the support. He just wants to get out of this damn tunic and into his comfiest clothes.

“Do I have any clean T-shirts left?” he asks. “Or did you and your sister go through all of them?”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it folks. The final chapter and then the epilogue. I'm posting both because they kind of belong together anyway, and I wouldn't feel right making you wait an extra 2 days just for a bit of fluff. :)
> 
> Thanks so much for all the comments and kudos that let me know how much you liked it. It's been a fun romp. See you next story?
> 
> ###### 

Magnus stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. It’s not as bad as it could have been. His hair will take time to re-grow, but the worst of his burns had already faded by the time he made his deal with Asmodeus.

The pale scars crawling along the major veins from his neck down to his feet are no worse than the silvery remnants of runes scattered all over Alec’s body. They make quite a matched pair.

From the moment they stepped back into the apartment yesterday morning, Izzy was on top of them. She kept hugging them at random moments throughout the day and prattled on at a mile a minute about everything Magnus had missed while he was gone. She didn’t say a word about Alec’s deal with the Seelie Queen.

When Izzy left for work sometime around six in the evening, neither Alec nor Magnus brought up the subject either.

Instead, they had sex.

The phrase is completely inadequate to describe what actually happened. Magnus’s knees threaten to give out on him just thinking about it, and he’ll be shifting in his seat a lot for at least the next couple of days.

Alec still hasn’t told him about the deal or shared his decision on the future of their relationship.

Magnus scoffs at his reflection before he leaves the bathroom and tiptoes past the grumbling lump of Izzy on the couch back into the bedroom.

His bed is still occupied by Alec. Sprawled out, gorgeous, naked except for the sheets tangled around his hips. Fast asleep. Magnus makes a noise that goes from a feeble “not fair” to a determined “later, pretty boy”.

He dresses in his favorite suit ensemble and grabs his keys from the three different sets crowding the small dish by the front door.

He left a note on the fridge that he’s gone to work and will be home by nine at the latest. He almost wrote six, but there is no way Raphael will not drag him to McKinney’s once he gets over the fact that Magnus is not dead.

He stops by his favorite coffee shop and picks up his usual order. Coffee for Clary, Luke, and himself. Chamomile tea for Raphael. Apple turnover for Clary.

The officer at the front desk downstairs gapes at Magnus when he walks past her and up the stairs. He’s pretty sure it’s the hair. That’s going to take everyone a while to get used to.

Magnus makes it as far as three steps onto the second floor when there is a high-pitched squeal and he is assaulted by five feet of flying red squirrel. He almost drops the coffee carrier and the small paper bag in his hands.

Clary has literally jumped up onto him and is clinging to his neck. It reminds him of Isabelle’s reaction yesterday morning. Those two girls would get along swimmingly. They should meet.

“Magnus!” she screeches in his ear before she cranes her neck in the direction of Luke’s office. “Dad! Raphael!” She’s still squeezing Magnus’s neck so tightly it’s cutting off blood flow to his brain. “You’re back. You’re alive! How are you alive?” She shakes her head. “Whatever. You’re alive! I missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too, biscuit,” he says. “Brought you something.”

He raises the bag with the apple turnover in hopes that it’ll make her let go of him.

Clary pulls back with a frown of confusion. She looks at his face. Then she looks at the bag in his hand. Then she grabs the bag, throws it away like it’s garbage, and dissolves into blubbering tears against his shoulder.

In hindsight, maybe funny wasn’t the best way to play this.

“It’s okay,” Magnus says, awkwardly patting her back. “I’m sorry. It’s okay.”

“I hate you,” she squeaks between sniffles. “You’re my favorite, but I hate you.”

When he looks up, Raphael and Luke are standing a few feet away. Luke’s arms are hanging loosely at his sides. His expression is fifty-fifty between baffled and relieved.

Raphael looks murderous. It’s the type of scowl to which Greek myths would have ascribed the power to crash ships, burn cities, and turn people into stone.

Magnus focuses on Luke first, because he’s always been a little bit of a coward.

“I know I didn’t technically put in for a vacation,” he says with a smile, “but I was hoping we can chalk it up to that, anyway.” He raises the coffee carrier in the hand that is not patting Clary. “I brought you coffee.”

Luke makes a gruff noise and crosses his arms in front of his chest.

“Your ‘vacation’ caused all of us a big headache,” he grumbles. “Don’t do anything like that again.”

Magnus nods, relieved down to his bones when Luke takes not just his cup of coffee, but also his daughter from Magnus’s hands and disappears into the captain’s office with a final, “Welcome back, Bane.”

Magnus stoops down and picks up Clary’s crushed turnover because he still can’t quite make himself look at Raphael. He stalls for every second it takes to throw the bag in the trash and put the beverage carrier on the corner of his own desk.

There is a ton of paperwork still in his inbox. Nobody has touched anything since he disappeared.

Magnus can feel the heavy weight of Raphael’s scowl on him the whole time. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been calcified yet.

“So,” he says.

His mouth and brain feel like they’re full of cotton. His palms are sweaty, and he’s not sure he can come up with anything really good. He still forces himself to turn around and look at the man who has been his surrogate son, his trusted partner, and one of his best friends for nearly eight decades.

“I know you’re really mad at me right now—“

That’s as far as he gets before his teeth bash against a rock-hard shoulder. Arms like iron bars are squeezing him so tightly that a few of his vertebrae pop under the pressure. Raphael’s breath ghosts in a shaky, hot burst across his ear.

“If you _ever_ do that to me again, I will burn every suit in your closet, smash all your makeup, shave your head, and beat you to death with your favorite pencil brush, do you hear me?”

Magnus doesn’t trust himself to say anything, so he just hugs Raphael back and nods against his shoulder.

Raphael keeps hugging him for a full ten seconds longer before he pulls back with a glower that’s no less severe than before.

“And we’re going to McKinney’s tonight.”

Magnus nods again.

It’s long past nine by the time Magnus gets home. It took longer than he thought to clear the air and get things back to normal between him and Raphael. The fact that Magnus is now just as mundane as Raphael somehow didn’t help much.

On the upside, Magnus got to meet Raphael’s soccer friend, Simon Lewis, and finally learned the last name of the adorable bartender, Maia Roberts. They are a cute, quirky couple full of pop-culture references that go way over Magnus’s head. He can’t wait to introduce them to Alec and Izzy.

The apartment is dark and quiet when he walks through the door and adds his keys to the little dish. One of the other two sets is gone.

The TV is playing some cooking show with the volume turned low. Izzy must have fallen asleep to it.

Magnus sighs. That’s his answer then.

Alec has gone out to hunt demons. He’s going to tear another one of Magnus’s plain black T-shirts to shreds and probably get himself killed.

It’s not even just the demons. The Shadowhunters are no doubt still looking to punish Alec and Izzy for breaking Clave law. Not to mention the mundane laws Alec is breaking with his vigilantism that will definitely get him arrested by the NYPD. Again.

Magnus tastes bile and disappointment at the back of his throat. He tiptoes quietly into the kitchenette to get himself a glass of water, trying not to disturb Izzy sleeping on the couch.

“Where were you?”

“Jesus!”

Magnus is pretty sure he just beat the record for high jump from a standing position.

Alec is standing behind the couch with crossed arms, furrowed brows, and a tightly clenched jaw. Full pack mule.

“Where were you?” he asks again.

“McKinney’s.”

Magnus turns back to the sink to finish filling the glass that he somehow managed not to drop. His heart is hammering in his chest from the unexpected shock.

Maybe Alec didn’t go out on patrol. Then again, maybe he just got back before Magnus. It is fairly late.

“Your note said you’d be home by nine.”

His world, inverted. Magnus takes a slow sip from his water glass and tries to cope.

“I’m sorry,” he says honestly. “It took longer than I expected. I should have called.”

He wants to know, but he’s still a coward. So, he asks something easier instead.

“Where’s Izzy?”

“She left for work at six, won’t be home ‘til one. They’re doing inventory tonight.”

“Ah.”

Magnus puts his glass down in the sink and forces himself to turn around and look.

Alec has moved around the couch. He’s leaning against the back of it now, long legs crossed at the ankles. His arms are open, hands braced on the headrest behind him. 

It’s now or never.

Magnus takes a deep breath and asks.

“Did you go out?”

Alec’s jaw tightens, muscles twitching.

“I was waiting for you to get home,” he says. “We never finished our discussion yesterday.”

“Right.”

Magnus can feel his knees threaten to give out. Now that it’s here, he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s only been back for a day. They’ve barely had the chance to get to know each other. He should never have made that stupid ultimatum in the first place.

He does the only thing he can think of. He bails and changes the subject. It only takes two steps and a twist to open the refrigerator and bury his head in the proverbial sand.

“Are you hungry?” he asks. “I had some chips and salsa at McKinney’s, but we didn’t really eat.”

The fridge is full to the brim, but nothing looks appetizing.

Alec scoffs behind him.

“I promised I’d never turn my back on you again. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.”

Magnus closes the fridge and turns around. He’s not sure he can handle it, but what choice does he have when Alec puts it like that?

He tries to smile, but it comes out wrong, like trying to smile for a photograph when you know they always capture your bad side.

“You’ve made your decision then?”

Alec chuckles. His hands are still braced on the back of the couch, ankles crossed. It’s different from his usual stubborn posture.

“I tried to come back,” he says, “the day that Raphael kicked us out.”

“So I heard,” Magnus says.

“What did Jace tell you?”

The name still causes an uncomfortable twinge in Magnus’s gut.

“He said you were determined and that you refused to go anywhere else.”

“Is that all?”

“Was there more?”

Alec smiles.

It’s cryptic, and infuriating, and Magnus wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he explains what the hell it means.

Alec averts his gaze to the floor at his feet.

“Jace told me everything. About the war. Valentine. Aldertree. Their crazy plans. The chaos at the Institute and back in Idris, and all I kept thinking about, the only thought that kept going through my head, like a bad mantra was, ‘Oh, crap. Magnus’.”

It’s Magnus’s turn to smile.

Alec catches him at it, shakes his head, and rolls his eyes to the ceiling.

“I figured out you were a warlock the night you yelled at us for going out on patrol.”

Magnus’s smile evaporates and he barely recovers from his uncouth gawk.

“How?”

“Your eyes changed. You accidentally flashed your demon mark. I knew for sure after I got back from patrol the next night and you had put up wards around the whole building. Thanks for that, by the way. It bought us a few hours.”

“Don’t mention it,” Magnus says tonelessly.

It certainly didn’t do anything to prevent Alec and Izzy from getting captured by the Shadowhunters in the end.

Alec lowers his chin to look at Magnus and the expression on his face is something that Magnus can’t read or describe.

“I was already falling in love with you when we did it in the kitchen.”

Magnus’s brows fly to his hairline. “That fast?”

“It was a steep fall.”

Magnus laughs. “You make it sound like a terrible accident.”

“Oh, it hurt.” Alec sniffs. “You were a warlock. I was a Shadowhunter. Plus, you treated me like a kid.”

“Was?”

Maybe Magnus shouldn’t be laser focused on a single auxiliary verb in a pretty big declaration, but the same talent for noticing details that helps him excel at his job sometimes also causes him to get hung up on the little things.

Alec chuckles. His face takes on an impish look like there’s an extra layer of inside joke that Magnus wouldn’t get.

“Anyway,” he says. “When they grabbed me and Izzy, two blocks from here, you were still all I could think about.” He sighs. “And then I had two weeks in an empty prison cell surrounded by nothing but grave markers, and with my sister locked up on the other side of a wall, to really think about my life choices.”

Magnus snorts. “I bet that really hurt.”

The look Alec gives him makes him feel even guiltier than the beating his own conscience is dishing out.

“I’m sorry.”

Alec nods, silently accepting the lame apology. He sighs and crosses his arms in front of his chest. The view is familiar, but it doesn’t come with the typical wall of defensiveness. Alec’s face is still open, brutally honest.

"I realized everything that had happened - to you, to me, to Izzy. It was all my fault."

Magnus wants to disagree, but he can't. The only thing he could say in Alec's defense is that they would have never met if it wasn't for that. Somehow, he doesn't think it would help right now. 

"And then you showed up to rescue us.” Alec glares at him. “On fire.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” slips out before Magnus can stop himself.

“I was never so damn scared in my life.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“I know.”

Neither of them says anything for a long minute. Magnus is tempted to break the silence, but he doesn’t know what to say. He has no idea what Alec is trying to tell him. He wonders if Alec felt the same way when Magnus dumped his long speech on him yesterday morning in Central Park.

Alec lets go of a long breath and uncrosses his arms, bracing his hands on the back of the couch again.

“You chased us out of there so fast. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t do anything except come back here and wait for you to come home, and it killed me.”

Magnus wants to say sorry again, but he presses his lips together tightly and waits for Alec to finish what he needs to say.

“I thought you were dead. Then I refused to believe you were dead. Then I finally got confirmation you weren’t.” He smirks. “So, when the Seelie Queen told me where you were and offered to create a pathway to get in and out of Edom in exchange for every last drop of angel-blood in my body, I almost laughed.”

Magnus is stunned. It’s obviously true, but it’s still hard to grasp. He huffs out a disbelieving laugh.

“You already gave up being a Shadowhunter.”

Alec shrugs. “I want to be with you, and I want to be just a mundane guy from New York. I guess you could say I made the selfish choice.”

Magnus has crossed the five steps between them in the blink of an eye.

“And you sat there and let me struggle through this whole big speech!”

He smacks Alec in the shoulder, hard.

Alec chuckles. “You looked like you really needed to get it off your chest.”

“I was dressed in a tunic!”

“Oh, believe me, I noticed.”

“You…”

Magnus struggles for words because his impulses are pulling him in two opposite directions. He wants to yell at Alec for putting him through this horrible emotional roller coaster. He also wants to drag him off into the bedroom and make a whole lot more selfish choices that will leave both of them sweaty, sticky, and too exhausted to get out of bed tomorrow morning.

Alec has the gall to provide a suggestion for finishing his insult.

“Ass?”

“Infuriating, beautiful monster.”

Alec cocks his head to the side like he’s considering the moniker. Then he smirks.

“I’ll take it.”

“That’s it.” Magnus raises one arm and points his index finger in the direction of the bedroom. “Get in there.”

Alec’s face shifts rather quickly from an expression of smug confidence to a deer caught in headlights.

“Why?”

“Because I’m about to put you over my knee and spank you, and that’s not happening in the living room.”

The look on Alec’s face makes a fair impression of the headlights getting closer.

It’s enough to make Magnus relent.

“I’m not actually going to spank you if you don’t want it,” he grumbles, “but if you let me, I’ll definitely screw that smugness right out of you.”

Alec relaxes. His rigid back and shoulders slump into a more natural curve and the expression on his face reflects curiosity and desire rather than surprise and shock.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, taking a few steps backward toward the bedroom. “You can try that.”

“Try?” Magnus scoffs, following him with a wolfish leer. “I’ve got four hundred years of experience on you, darling. I once seduced Casanova himself.”

Alec’s smile disappears. “You did?”

Magnus grits his teeth. They’re really going to have to work on Alec’s wonky self-confidence levels. For a reckless, stubborn ass, he is unnecessarily insecure about the weirdest things.

“Of course not really,” he says with an eye roll, “but it usually makes for a great pick-up line.”

Alec shakes his head. “It’s kinda cringey.”

“Cringey?” They’re past the threshold of the bedroom now. “You wound me, Alexander.”

Magnus shuts the bedroom door with finality, determined to show Alec just how not-cringey the skills he has picked up over the last four centuries are.


	14. Epilogue

Izzy’s rear-end is sticking out of the refrigerator, wiggling impatiently as she stomps her feet and makes grumbling noises at whatever she’s looking at inside.

“Can we order pizza? I’m starving and nothing in here looks good.”

Magnus rolls his eyes at her from the couch. Every time she doesn’t know what to eat, pizza is Izzy’s default choice.

“We just had pizza three days ago,” he says. “How about Thai?”

Alec tilts his head back in Magnus’s lap and makes a face at him.

“I don’t feel like eating spicy tonight, and you always get that stuff that makes your breath smell horrible.”

“Shut up, it doesn’t.”

Magnus yanks at the thick mop of hair between his fingers. It does, but that doesn’t mean Alec has to tell him that every time.

Alec turns around and nips at his stomach in retaliation.

“Does.”

Magnus rubs the sore spot and bares his teeth in a warning snarl. It doesn’t last long under the devastating effect of Alec’s cheeky grin.

“Greek?” Izzy pipes up from the kitchen.

“No!”

The reaction is instantaneous and unanimous between Alec and Magnus.

Izzy huffs and bangs the fridge door shut with a little too much gusto.

“I’m not going to starve because you two can’t decide. I have my math test tomorrow morning, and I’m not going in there with half a brain because you didn’t feed me.” 

Alec rolls his eyes and grumbles, “Feed me, Seymour,” in a surprisingly accurate imitation of the alien plant from the Little Shop of Horrors.

Magnus snickers and turns to look over the back of the couch.

“How about tacos?” he suggests.

Izzy is standing in the kitchen in her favorite T-shirt and silk boxers combo, complete with fuzzy socks. Her hair is tucked up in a messy bun with two pencils. She’s not wearing makeup and she looks stressed out. Cramming for her GED must really be getting to her.

“Real ones or Taco Bell?” she asks with a pout.

“Whichever you prefer, kitten.”

She bites her lips. “Will you go get them?”

That means Izzy wants the real ones, which means a twenty-minute drive.

Magnus flops his head back on the backrest of the couch and closes his eyes with a pained cringe. He didn’t get home from work until half an hour ago, and he really didn’t plan on moving from the couch until it’s time to go to bed.

Alec raises himself from Magnus’s lap with a frustrated roar and gets up from the couch like an angry mummy.

“I’ll go get them,” he says.

“Thanks,” says Magnus at the same time that Izzy squeals, “You’re the best!”

Alec makes a grumbling noise and puts his boots on.

“The usual?”

“Yes, please,” Izzy chirps.

Magnus turns around to enjoy the view of Alec bent over, tying his shoes. He swears Alec’s ass has become even firmer since he started training.

It was impossible to take the hero out of Alec. Within a week of looking for a job, he’d gone and applied to the closest fire station. There had been a lot of paperwork fudging involved, but a few weeks later, Alec was successfully enrolled in the recruit academy and on his way to becoming a full-time firefighter.

Magnus feels some kind of way about it. It’s a dangerous job. There are risks. But it’s what Alec wants to do, and at least it doesn’t involve nightly sword fights with demons while breaking the law.

“Don’t forget the churros,” Magnus says helpfully as Alec grabs his keys from the dish by the front door.

“Love you, too,” Alec says just before the door closes behind him.

Izzy chortles. “You think we made him mad?”

Magnus shrugs. “It’s his day off, he can do us a favor.” 

He’s feeling all warm and fuzzy again. Hearing Alec say he loves him, even when it’s a semi-sarcastic grumble on his way out the door, does the trick every time.

Their life together is as mundane as it gets. Magnus wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Sure, he will probably have a mild freak-out the first time he finds a gray hair in the mirror. He’ll deal. There are mundane solutions for that kind of problem.

Of course, it’ll be difficult when Izzy finishes her GED and goes off to college. She wants to be a doctor. Magnus has no doubt she will be an excellent one. It makes him think of Catarina, but the pain of her loss is now mixed in with fond memories and the excitement he feels to help Izzy’s dream come true.

The ridiculous amount of wealth he has accumulated over his centuries as a very prolific warlock will definitely come in handy for that.

The money will pay for Izzy’s college. It has already payed for this building. Without magic, the only way to make enough room for all three of them without moving somewhere else was to literally buy the whole building and pay someone to knock down the wall beside the bathroom door to connect this apartment to the one next door. The construction will take weeks. In the meantime, they bought a large sectional that turns into a queen size bed.

It feels a little bit like cheating at life, but Magnus tells himself he earned it. He went to hell and back to have this. Literally.

“Magnus?”

“Hmm?”

He looks up at Izzy’s face. She’s looking at him funny.

“Why were you making mushy-face at my fuzzy socks?”

“Sorry,” he shakes himself out of it. “Just thinking.”

“About what?”

Magnus makes a vague shrugging motion.

“Life.”

Izzy snickers. “The universe and everything?”

Magnus laughs and rolls his eyes. “You’ve been hanging out with Simon and Maia.”

“Actually,” she says with a smile, “I got that one from Clary.”

The smile is a lot softer than anything he’s ever seen on her face before and the way she says Clary is the same way that Magnus often catches himself using Alec’s full name.

“You really like my favorite admin,” he drawls.

“Shut up,” she says quickly. “God, what is taking Alec so long?”

Magnus snickers. “He just left. I figure I have a good thirty minutes to grill you about your obvious crush.”

“Shut up!”

Izzy’s face does a fairly accurate impression of a ripe tomato before she’s across the couch and on top of him, drumming him with her fists just this side of playful. Sometimes, she doesn’t know her own strength. She still has angel blood, after all.

“Ouch, ouch, kitten. Ouch! Stop! Okay, I give up.”

Izzy relents and shoves herself into the opposite corner of the couch. She still kicks at Magnus with one of her fuzzy-socked feet.

“We’ve only gone on like one date,” she grumbles, “and I’m not even sure it was a date.”

Magnus smiles. “Why don’t you tell me about it, and I’ll tell you if it was a date?”

Izzy perks up immediately.

“Okay, so remember when Simon and Maia got tickets for the Blade Runner marathon, and we were all supposed to go together?”

Magnus leans back against the pillows and listens to Izzy spin the story of her first date with Clary. It’s cute and funny.

Somewhere toward the end of it, Alec gets back with two loaded paper bags from the Mexican place that’s a twenty-minute drive away, but so worth it for the food.

They end up snuggling across both lengths of the sectional, watching some cop drama that’s obviously trying to create a back-door pilot for another show about a hospital.

Life couldn’t get more mundane.

Magnus couldn’t love it more.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this one jumped up and bit me out of nowhere with a single, clear visual of Izzy and Alec, sitting in individual interrogation rooms at some police station, and they refuse to say anything at all except to ask their interrogators: "Where's Izzy?" and "Where's Alec?"
> 
> The rest of this crazy story sprung from there and was completed in 9 days without a beta reader.
> 
> Let me know what you think. I'm still iffy about writing in present tense. Not sure if I like it or hate it.


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